Senior Graphic and Brand Designer

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Senior Graphic and Brand Designer

Company: Rootly

Location: Canada (Remote)

Job Type: Full-Time

Category: Creative & Design / Marketing Operations

Date Posted: 2026-09-15

Experience Level: 5-10 years

Remote Status: Fully Remote

🚀 Role Summary

• This role is pivotal in defining and executing Rootly's visual brand identity across all touchpoints, from digital platforms to physical assets.

• You will be responsible for building and maintaining a comprehensive brand system, ensuring consistency and quality across marketing, product, and external communications.

• The Senior Graphic and Brand Designer will collaborate closely with Product Design and Marketing teams to translate brand strategy into compelling visual narratives that drive engagement and support GTM efforts.

• This is a foundational role, offering significant ownership and the opportunity to shape the visual language of a category-defining B2B SaaS company.

📝 Enhancement Note: While the title is "Senior Graphic and Brand Designer," the responsibilities and context strongly suggest a role with significant overlap into Marketing Operations and GTM enablement, particularly in asset creation for sales and marketing campaigns. The emphasis on building a brand system from scratch and its application across marketing surfaces indicates a strategic rather than purely execution-focused design role.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Brand System Ownership: Lead the development and ongoing management of Rootly's comprehensive brand system, including logo evolution, typography, color palettes, iconography, illustration style, and photography guidelines.

• Asset Creation & Delivery: Design and produce a wide range of marketing and sales collateral, including but not limited to landing pages, digital ads, one-pagers, battlecards, sales decks, case studies, social media graphics, blog headers, and video thumbnails.

• Product Integration: Create in-app graphics, empty states, onboarding illustrations, and other visual elements for the product UI that align with the overall brand identity and enhance user experience.

• Template & Component Development: Build reusable design components and templates within Figma to empower the marketing team and ensure scalability and consistency of design output.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Product Design, Product Marketing Management (PMM), Content, and executive leadership (CEO, Founders) to ensure a cohesive and impactful visual representation of Rootly in the market.

• Brand Governance: Develop and maintain clear brand guidelines, ensuring adherence across all internal and external communications and assets.

• Quality & Craftsmanship: Uphold and elevate the visual standard of the brand, bringing a high level of craft, taste, and attention to detail to all design work.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities emphasize building from the ground up and creating templates for scale, indicating a need for a designer who can establish processes and systems, not just execute individual design tasks. This aligns with GTM operations' need for efficient and consistent asset production.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design, Visual Communications, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. Experience:

• 5+ years of professional experience in graphic design and/or brand design, with a significant portion spent in a fast-paced startup environment.

• Proven experience working both in-house and at an agency or design studio is highly desirable.

• Experience within B2B SaaS, developer tools, or related technology sectors is a strong plus.

• Familiarity with incident management, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture is a significant advantage. Required Skills:

• Brand Identity Development: Demonstrated ability to create and evolve comprehensive brand identities, including logo design, color theory, and visual systems.

• Graphic Design Proficiency: Expertise in creating a diverse range of marketing and sales collateral, ensuring visual appeal and strategic communication.

• Figma Expertise: Advanced proficiency in Figma for design, prototyping, and component library creation. Ability to create clean, dev-ready files for handoff.

• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of design systems, component-based design, and the ability to build scalable and maintainable design frameworks.

• Typography & Layout: Excellent command of typography, layout principles, and visual hierarchy to create clear and compelling designs.

• Cross-Functional Communication: Ability to effectively collaborate with product, marketing, and leadership teams, translating needs into visual solutions.

• Self-Starter & Ownership: Proven ability to work independently, set direction, and take full ownership of projects from concept to completion.

Preferred Skills:

• Product/UI Design Exposure: Experience designing for digital product interfaces, including in-app graphics, empty states, and onboarding flows.

• Illustration Skills: Ability to create custom illustrations that align with brand aesthetics.

• Motion Design Basics: Familiarity with motion design principles for animated graphics or product UI elements.

• Understanding of GTM Processes: Awareness of how design assets support sales enablement and marketing campaign effectiveness.

📝 Enhancement Note: The requirement for "systems thinking" and "building or evolving a brand system" is critical for this role. It signifies a need for a candidate who can establish the foundational visual infrastructure for Rootly, which directly supports scalable GTM operations. The "self-starter" mentality implies the candidate will define their own processes and workflows.

📊 Process & Systems Portfolio Requirements

Portfolio Essentials:

• Brand Identity Case Studies: Showcase at least two comprehensive brand identity projects, detailing the problem, your strategic approach, the design process, and the final visual system (logo, color, typography, etc.).

• Marketing Collateral Examples: Include a range of marketing assets designed for B2B SaaS, demonstrating versatility in creating landing pages, decks, one-pagers, digital ads, and social media graphics. Highlight how these assets supported specific GTM objectives.

• Product/UI Integration Examples: Present any work related to in-app graphics, UI elements, or illustrations that were integrated into a digital product, showcasing an understanding of user experience and product design principles.

• Design System Contribution: If applicable, provide examples of contributions to or creation of design systems, component libraries, or style guides, emphasizing scalability and maintainability.

• Figma Proficiency Demonstration: Ensure your portfolio clearly indicates your proficiency in Figma, ideally with examples of complex file structures, component usage, or collaborative workflows.

Process Documentation:

• Be prepared to discuss your process for developing a brand system from scratch, including research, ideation, stakeholder feedback, and implementation.

• Articulate your approach to creating marketing assets that are not only visually appealing but also strategically aligned with GTM goals and target audiences.

• Detail your methodology for ensuring brand consistency across diverse platforms and touchpoints.

• Explain how you would collaborate with engineering for asset handoffs and with marketing for campaign execution.

📝 Enhancement Note: The emphasis on a portfolio that shows "range across brand identity work, marketing collateral, and at least some exposure to product or UI surfaces" and the need to "build a visual system from the ground up" directly translates to portfolio requirements. Candidates must demonstrate not just design skill but also the ability to architect and implement scalable visual solutions that support GTM functions.

💵 Compensation & Benefits

Salary Range:

• Based on industry benchmarks for Senior Graphic and Brand Designers in Canada with 5-10 years of experience in B2B SaaS, a competitive salary range is estimated between $90,000 - $130,000 CAD annually. This estimate considers the fully remote nature, the startup environment, and the significant ownership and impact of the role. Benefits:

• Competitive Compensation: A strong base salary reflecting your experience and impact.

• Early Equity: Opportunity to gain ownership in a fast-growing, venture-backed company.

• Comprehensive Health Coverage: Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans.

• Generous Paid Time Off: 3 weeks of vacation, plus unlimited sick days and mental health days.

• Company-Wide Shutdown: A dedicated period at the end of the year for collective rest and recharge.

• Home Office Setup: A $500 stipend to create an optimized remote workspace.

• Unlimited Token Usage & AI Access: Access to advanced tools to enhance productivity and creativity.

Working Hours:

• Standard full-time hours, typically around 40 hours per week. Rootly operates with a high degree of transparency and emphasizes results, allowing for flexibility in how and when work is accomplished, provided deadlines are met and collaboration is maintained.

📝 Enhancement Note: The salary range is an estimate based on typical compensation for a Senior Graphic and Brand Designer in Canada, adjusted for the tech/SaaS industry and remote work. The benefits package is directly pulled from the provided text and highlighted for its comprehensiveness.

🎯 Team & Company Context

🏢 Company Culture

Industry: B2B SaaS / Incident Management / Cloud Infrastructure / DevOps tooling. Rootly is carving out a new market segment focused on enterprise-grade incident management, an area critical for companies prioritizing reliability and uptime.

Company Size: Rootly is a fast-growing startup, likely in the early to growth-stage (e.g., 50-200 employees, though not explicitly stated). This means a dynamic environment with opportunities for high impact and rapid career progression.

Founded: Rootly was founded with a mission to be the go-to solution for companies responding to incidents, aiming to build a new market segment. Their focus on reliability and transparency is a core tenet.

Team Structure:

• Design Team: You will work closely with the Product Design team, who are responsible for UX and UI. This role is the first dedicated brand designer, indicating a foundational build-out of the design function.

• Marketing & GTM: Close partnership with the Marketing team, who own content and messaging, and the broader Go-To-Market (GTM) functions, which will heavily leverage your design outputs for campaigns and sales enablement.

• Leadership: Direct collaboration with the CEO and Founders, highlighting the strategic importance of this role and the visibility it will have.

Methodology:

• Transparency First: Rootly emphasizes transparency, conducting monthly financial reviews and sharing updates via a weekly changelog. This culture likely extends to design processes, encouraging open communication and feedback.

• Data-Driven: While not explicitly stated for design, the company's focus on building a market segment and serving fast-growing tech companies suggests an underlying data-informed approach to decision-making.

• Agile & Fast-Paced: The description highlights moving fast, with ownership being rewarded. This implies an agile approach to design and development, with a focus on shipping quickly and iterating.

Company Website: https://rootly.com/

📝 Enhancement Note: The company context emphasizes Rootly's mission-driven approach, its position in a new market segment, and its transparent culture. For a brand designer, this means understanding the target audience (likely technical decision-makers in IT/Ops) and contributing to a brand that conveys reliability, innovation, and partnership.

📈 Career & Growth Analysis

Operations Career Level: Senior Individual Contributor. This role is positioned as the "first dedicated brand designer," implying significant autonomy and leadership within the brand design function. It's a senior IC role where you define the function's direction rather than manage a team.

Reporting Structure: While not explicitly stated, given the emphasis on partnering with Product Design and Marketing, this role likely reports into a Head of Product, Head of Marketing, or potentially directly to a founder/CEO, depending on the current organizational structure of this fast-growing startup.

Operations Impact: The brand designer's work will have a direct and measurable impact on Rootly's Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. High-quality, consistent branding across all assets is crucial for:

• Lead Generation: Attracting prospects through compelling marketing materials.

• Sales Enablement: Providing sales teams with effective collateral to close deals.

• Brand Perception: Building trust and credibility with target customers (e.g., NVIDIA, Figma, Canva).

• Product Adoption: Enhancing the user experience through well-designed in-app visuals.

Growth Opportunities:

• Foundational Leadership: As the first dedicated brand designer, you have the opportunity to build and shape the entire brand design function, establishing processes, standards, and potentially a future team.

• Strategic Influence: Direct collaboration with founders and executive leadership provides a unique opportunity to influence company-wide brand strategy and GTM initiatives.

• Skill Expansion: Potential to expand into product design, marketing campaign strategy, and visual storytelling for a category-defining product.

• Career Progression: Opportunity to grow into a Design Lead or Head of Brand role as the company scales.

📝 Enhancement Note: The "Operations Impact" section is reframed to highlight how design directly supports GTM and revenue operations by enabling sales and marketing efforts. The growth opportunities focus on building a function and strategic influence, common trajectories for senior individual contributors in startups.

🌐 Work Environment

Office Type: Fully Remote. The role is designated as "TELECOMMUTE" with "Canada" as the derived location, indicating a remote-first or remote-friendly approach within Canada.

Office Location(s): While the role is remote, the company headquarters is likely in a major tech hub (e.g., San Francisco Bay Area, New York) given its VC backing and customer base, though this is not explicitly stated. The "Office" location listed under locations_raw for "CAN" might refer to a registered entity or a general operational presence rather than a physical office for this role.

Workspace Context:

• Remote Collaboration: You will be part of a distributed team, requiring strong skills in asynchronous communication and virtual collaboration tools.

• Tooling: Access to standard design tools (Figma) and potentially other collaboration platforms (Slack, Notion, etc.) will be essential.

• Team Interaction: While remote, expect regular virtual meetings and touchpoints with product design, marketing, and leadership to ensure alignment and foster a connected team environment.

Work Schedule:

• The role is Full-Time, typically 40 hours per week. While remote work offers flexibility, core working hours may be expected to overlap with key team members in North America for effective collaboration.

📝 Enhancement Note: The "Workspace Context" focuses on the implications of a remote work environment for a designer, emphasizing collaboration tools and communication strategies.

📄 Application & Portfolio Review Process

Interview Process:

• Initial Screening: A review of your resume and portfolio to assess fit for the "Senior Graphic and Brand Designer" role and early-stage startup environment.

• Portfolio Presentation & Discussion: You will likely present your portfolio to key stakeholders (e.g., Head of Product/Marketing, Founders). Expect to walk through 2-3 key projects, detailing your process, strategic thinking, and impact.

• Design Challenge/Exercise: A practical exercise may be given to assess your ability to create assets under constraints, develop a brand system component, or solve a specific design problem relevant to Rootly's GTM needs.

• Cross-Functional Interviews: Meetings with members of the Product Design and Marketing teams to evaluate collaboration style, communication, and cultural fit.

• Founder/Executive Interview: A final discussion to assess strategic alignment, leadership potential, and overall fit with Rootly's vision and culture.

Portfolio Review Tips:

• Tell a Story: For each project, clearly articulate the problem, your strategic approach, the design process, your specific contributions, and the measurable outcomes or impact.

• Showcase Brand System Thinking: Emphasize your ability to build and maintain cohesive design systems, not just individual assets. Detail how you ensure consistency.

• Highlight GTM Relevance: For marketing collateral, explain how your designs supported specific campaign objectives, lead generation, or sales enablement.

• Demonstrate Figma Proficiency: Ensure your Figma files are well-organized, and be ready to discuss your workflow and approach to creating scalable components.

• Tailor to Rootly: Research Rootly's current brand and understand their mission. Be prepared to discuss how you would evolve or enhance their visual identity.

Challenge Preparation:

• Brand Extension: Be ready to apply Rootly's existing (or a proposed) brand identity to new marketing collateral or product UI elements.

• System Building: You might be asked to outline the key components of a brand system or design a specific reusable component.

• Problem-Solving: Prepare to discuss how you would approach a design challenge with limited information or tight deadlines. Focus on your process and strategic rationale.

📝 Enhancement Note: This section is geared towards a design role, focusing on portfolio presentation, design challenges, and collaboration with product/marketing, which are key for a brand designer supporting GTM.

🛠 Tools & Technology Stack

Primary Design Tools:

• Figma: The core tool for all design work, including brand identity, asset creation, prototyping, and component library management. Mastery is essential.

Asset Creation & Management:

• Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects): While Figma is primary, proficiency in other Adobe tools is beneficial for advanced image editing, illustration, or motion graphics.

• Loom / Screen Recording Tools: For asynchronous communication, design reviews, and demoing.

Collaboration & Productivity:

• Slack: For real-time communication and team interaction.

• Notion / Confluence: Likely used for documentation, brand guidelines, project management, and knowledge sharing.

• Google Workspace (Docs, Slides, Sheets): For document creation, presentations, and data sharing, especially for marketing and sales collateral.

Potential Future Tools (as the team scales):

• DAM (Digital Asset Management) Systems: For organizing and distributing brand assets as the company grows.

• Project Management Software: Tools like Asana, Jira, or Trello for workflow management.

📝 Enhancement Note: The emphasis on Figma is paramount, as it's the primary tool for modern design teams, especially in startups. Mentioning Adobe Suite acknowledges broader design capabilities, and collaboration tools are standard for remote work.

👥 Team Culture & Values

Operations Values:

• Transparency: Rootly lives by a "transparency first" culture, evident in their financial reviews and public changelogs. This implies an expectation of open communication, honest feedback, and clear articulation of design decisions.

• Ownership: The company seeks teammates who "crave ownership." For a brand designer, this means taking full responsibility for the brand's visual execution and proactively identifying opportunities for improvement.

• High Bar, High Impact: Rootly operates in a "high-bar, high-impact environment." This means expecting rigorous standards in design quality and recognizing that your work will significantly influence the company's success.

• Reliability: As an incident management platform, reliability is core to Rootly's product. This value should translate into the design of their brand, conveying trustworthiness and stability.

• Innovation: Building a new market segment requires continuous innovation. The brand should reflect a forward-thinking and cutting-edge company.

Collaboration Style:

• Cross-Functional Integration: Close collaboration with Product Design and Marketing is essential. Expect regular syncs, design critiques, and joint brainstorming sessions.

• Partnership Model: Rootly emphasizes a "unique partnership model" with customers. This likely extends to internal collaboration, fostering a supportive and collaborative team environment.

• Agile Feedback Loops: Given the fast-paced nature, expect iterative design processes with frequent feedback from stakeholders to ensure alignment and rapid iteration.

📝 Enhancement Note: The "Operations Values" are interpreted through the lens of a creative role, focusing on how transparency, ownership, and high standards apply to design work and team interactions.

⚡ Challenges & Growth Opportunities

Challenges:

• Establishing a New Brand System: Building a comprehensive brand system from scratch requires significant strategic thinking, foresight, and the ability to anticipate future needs. This can be challenging but highly rewarding.

• Balancing Speed and Craft: Working in a fast-paced startup means consistently delivering high-quality work under tight deadlines. Learning to prioritize and manage time effectively will be key.

• Cross-Functional Alignment: Ensuring that design vision aligns with the diverse needs and perspectives of Product, Marketing, Sales, and Leadership can be complex.

• Scaling Design Output: As the company grows, maintaining brand consistency and efficiency will become increasingly important, requiring scalable solutions like component libraries and templates.

Learning & Development Opportunities:

• Brand Strategy Leadership: Develop deep expertise in brand strategy and execution for a category-defining B2B SaaS company.

• Product Design Exposure: Gain practical experience applying brand principles within a product UI, bridging the gap between marketing and product design.

• GTM Strategy Influence: Directly contribute to and influence Go-To-Market strategies through impactful visual design.

• Industry Expertise: Deepen understanding of the incident management, DevOps, and SRE spaces, allowing for more informed and resonant design.

• Mentorship: Opportunity to be mentored by founders and senior leaders, and potentially mentor future design hires.

📝 Enhancement Note: The challenges and growth opportunities are framed to appeal to a senior designer looking for strategic impact and professional development within a high-growth startup context.

💡 Interview Preparation

Strategy Questions:

• Brand System Vision: "Describe your process for building a brand system from the ground up for a B2B SaaS company. What are the key considerations, and how would you ensure its scalability and adoption within Rootly?"

• GTM Asset Strategy: "How do you approach designing marketing collateral (e.g., decks, one-pagers) to effectively support sales enablement and drive lead generation? Can you walk us through an example from your portfolio and its impact?"

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: "Imagine you're working on a critical launch campaign. How would you collaborate with Product Marketing, Content, and Product Design to ensure a cohesive visual and messaging strategy?"

Company & Culture Questions:

• Rootly's Brand Identity: "Based on what you've seen of Rootly's current brand, what opportunities do you see for evolution or enhancement? How would you approach this as the first dedicated brand designer?"

• Startup Environment: "This role requires a high degree of ownership and comfort with ambiguity. How have you demonstrated these qualities in previous fast-paced environments?"

• Impact Measurement: "How do you measure the success of your design work, particularly for marketing and sales assets? What metrics are most important to you?"

Portfolio Presentation Strategy:

• Focus on Process: Don't just show final assets; explain why you made certain design choices and how you arrived at them. Detail your research, ideation, and iteration phases.

• Quantify Impact: Whenever possible, provide data or evidence of how your designs contributed to business goals (e.g., increased engagement, conversion rates, positive feedback).

• Showcase Systems Thinking: Clearly illustrate how your work fits into a larger brand system, emphasizing consistency and reusability.

• Be Prepared for Figma Deep Dive: Have your Figma files organized and be ready to demonstrate your understanding of components, auto-layout, and efficient workflows.

• Tailor Your Narrative: Connect your past experiences and projects directly to the requirements and challenges outlined in the Rootly job description.

📝 Enhancement Note: The interview questions are crafted to probe the candidate's strategic thinking, GTM understanding, and ability to operate in a startup environment, aligning with the role's demands.

📌 Application Steps

To apply for this Senior Graphic and Brand Designer position:

• Submit your application through the provided application link.

• Portfolio Customization: Curate your portfolio to prominently feature brand identity case studies, marketing collateral relevant to B2B SaaS, and any product/UI integration examples. Ensure your strongest, most relevant work is easily accessible and clearly explains your process and impact.

• Resume Optimization: Tailor your resume to highlight 5+ years of experience in graphic and brand design, emphasizing startup experience, Figma proficiency, and any B2B SaaS or DevOps/SRE familiarity. Use keywords from the job description.

• Interview Preparation: Practice articulating your design process, strategic thinking, and how you would build a brand system from the ground up. Prepare to present 2-3 key portfolio projects and discuss your approach to collaboration and GTM enablement.

• Company Research: Thoroughly research Rootly's mission, product, current brand presence, and customer base. Understand their position in the market and prepare thoughtful questions about their brand strategy and future vision.

⚠️ Important Notice: This enhanced job description includes AI-generated insights and operations industry-standard assumptions. All details should be verified directly with the hiring organization before making application decisions.