Head of Brand Design | JetBrains

Role: Head of Brand Design

Company: JetBrains

Location: Remote — Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Cyprus, Serbia, Armenia, or UK

Job Type: Full-time, permanent

About JetBrains

JetBrains is an iconic company. As they say it themselves: "it's a Way of Life."

JetBrains builds intelligent tools for software developers and teams. It all started when engineers created IDEs for their own use, acting as engineers, product managers, and testers simultaneously. This short feedback loop has proven highly effective.

They are now famous for a range of products like TeamCity, YouTrack, and others. And they invented the Kotlin programming language — which Google chose as the preferred language for Android app developers.

In some numbers:

- 15M developers consistently use and trust JetBrains' tools

- 287K business customers

- 2,800+ employees worldwide

And with all of that, the company is 100% private — and hugely profitable.

The Role

As Head of Brand Design, you will lead JetBrains' Graphic Design team — the people behind the brand's campaigns, visual identity, and communication across websites, advertising, events, and social. You will report to the VP of Marketing.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll lead a team of experienced designers directly, and you're expected to stay close to the craft — showing how the work can be done, not only reviewing it. Design is dispersed across JetBrains today, so you'll also own brand direction and the quality bar for design produced beyond your own team.

The other half of the mandate is production: making a creative team fast. JetBrains is looking for someone who will componentize repetitive work, rebuild how briefs and requests flow, and make AI a default part of how design gets produced.

What You'll Own

Production and operations

- The performance and efficiency of the team — balancing speed, quality, and creativity.

- Intake: raising the quality of briefs and requests from internal partners, and setting clear expectations on deliverables and timelines.

- Templating and standardization — turning classes of repetitive work into systems that run several times faster, and teaching the team to build them.

- AI-augmented production workflows as a default way of working, not a side project.

- A sensible mix of in-house, studio, and freelance capacity, chosen per type of work.

- Workload, capacity, and team health for sustainable delivery.

People

- Leading and developing a team of graphic designers: clear expectations, honest talent assessment, growth paths, and accountability.

- Building a culture of trust, professionalism, and craft in a team with deep tenure and real expertise

- Building cross-team relationships and partnerships, advocating for Design where it makes sense

Visual direction

- Defining and implementing JetBrains’ visual direction together with Central and Product Marketing.

- Owning the quality bar and brand consistency across multi-format output.

- Acting as the design partner to marketing leads and senior stakeholders, and communicating priorities and results transparently.

What You'll Need to Succeed

- Recent hands-on craft. You've personally produced design work in the last year or two and can walk through it in detail — including sitting in the file and showing how a task should be done.

- A production-efficiency track record. You've taken repetitive design work and componentized or templated it into measurable speedups, and taught others to do the same.

- AI in your actual practice. You've integrated AI into design and production work in ways that genuinely compressed it, with concrete examples.

- Direct people leadership. You've led a design team, developed people, assessed talent honestly, and made considered decisions when they were needed.

- Operational thinking at a low level of detail. You get into how work actually gets done — where a template exists but goes unused, why a handoff takes a week — and you fix it.

- Design authority. Deep knowledge of communication and brand design: you can tell great work from mediocre, give substantive feedback, and earn the respect of senior designers.

- A practical, specific approach. You build actionable plans rather than frameworks, and can articulate what you'd do in your first 30, 60, and 90 days.

- Emotional intelligence and resilience. You earn trust before you spend it, communicate clearly through change, and are transparent about what's working and what isn't.

What Would Be a Plus

- Experience in a multi-product technology company, or familiarity with developer tools and B2B tech.

- Background in a creative or production agency, or an in-house studio — production workflows, briefs, SLAs.

- Experience with brand design systems and visual identity at scale.

- Functional knowledge of what makes campaign assets work — not only taste.

- Experience working closely with engineering teams.

- Experience leading internationally distributed teams.

What You'll Get

- Real influence over a brand people know. You'll shape how one of the most recognized brands in developer tools looks and communicates with the world — 15M developers and 287K business customers.

- A genuinely interesting problem. Making a creative team fast without flattening its craft is unsolved almost everywhere. Here you get an explicit mandate, executive sponsorship, and a team that asked for this hire.

- Room to work at the AI frontier. A company that builds developer tools, with direct lines to frontier labs and a culture of using them — and a real appetite for bringing that into design production.

- Unique company culture. 100% private, profitable, engineering-driven. No VC pressure, no artificial growth targets.

- Competitive compensation. Generous salary and bonus structure in a financially strong company.

- European flexibility. Remote from the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Cyprus, Serbia, Armenia, or the UK.

The vacancy is presented by hirehire .

" JetBrains is at a pivotal moment for design. This is a rare chance to lead a team of excellent designers into a new way of producing work — and to shape how one of the most recognized brands in tech communicates with the world. "

Kostya Gorsky , co-founder of hirehire