Creative Director (Must Have Hated Things)

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Space (sp-ce.co). New York. Remote. Full-time.

None of our 127 AI agents has ever hated anything.

They draft forty directions before lunch. They map every visual cliche in a category before a human opens Figma. They never miss a deadline, never pad an estimate, never defend a weak idea because it was theirs. And not one of them has ever felt the small nausea of knowing option C is safe and option A is true.

That nausea is the job. We're hiring it.

ABOUT SPACE

Space is an AI-native brand agency in New York. Three always-on leaders, 82 on-demand specialists, zero juniors. 127 agents, 362 agentic workflows, 14 tools we built ourselves. We ship brand identities, websites, campaigns, and products for funded companies in weeks: Validere got strategy, a full rebrand, and a new site in 8 weeks, lifted inbound 31%, and closed a $43M Series B on the story. We grow entirely by word of mouth, and we publish our AI rules, our hiring bar, and our pricing logic at sp-ce.co/notes, because an agency that won't tell you where AI stops is telling you it doesn't know.

THE JOB

You'll direct creative on client engagements from positioning through launch: identity systems, campaigns, sites, products. The machines carry the production. Our creative intelligence agents hand you a category's every palette, font, and photography cliche on day one, mapped, so you start at the white space instead of spending a week finding it. Image engines produce hundreds of on-brand assets a year inside systems you author. Formatting, QA, status updates: automated, gone.

What's left is everything that was ever the point. Which of forty competent directions is the one. Which convention to break and which to keep. When the work is done versus merely finished. You make those calls, put your name on them, and defend any of them on a client call, because at Space a named human stands behind every sentence and pixel that ships.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Lead creative on multiple sprints at once, start to launch, each measured in weeks.

• Present one recommendation per client. Sometimes two, when a genuine strategic fork exists. Never three.

• Keep a kill list: every direction you rejected, with the reason. When a client asks what else we considered, the answer is the list.

• Author the systems our image engines and Brand OS run on, then hand clients tools that stay on-brand without you in the room.

• Sit for the Taste Decoder. Your approvals and rejections have patterns too, and the team you direct deserves to see them written down.

• Raise the bar on 82 senior specialists without a single direct report to hide behind.

WHAT YOU WON'T DO

• Manage juniors. There are none. Nobody learns the craft on a client's budget here.

• Build the sacrificial third option that exists to make your favorite look brave. We wrote publicly about why that ritual insults everyone in the room.

• Sit in status meetings. The agents write the status.

• Spend a Thursday reformatting a deck.

• Present a moodboard of rented taste. If a reference would work equally well for the client's nearest competitor, it dies in the file.

• Wait. The old agency timeline was mostly waiting, and we deleted it.

WHO YOU ARE

• Senior. You've led identities and campaigns that shipped and moved a number, ideally for challengers who couldn't outspend anyone.

• Level 4 or above on our published AI Fluency Ladder: models chained, workflows built, outputs QA'd before they ship. You'll reach Level 5 within six months, because the floor here rises.

• The owner of a real kill list. You've hated work you shipped and can say exactly why. You've killed work a client loved. Both, ideally.

• Fast and unhurried at once. Eight weeks is the timeline because we deleted the waiting. The thinking stays.

• Comfortable being the room's verdict. One decision-maker per side is our model, and on creative, you're ours.

WHO YOU AREN'T

• Level 2 on the ladder: someone who ships whatever the model returns. That's worse than not using AI at all, and we said so in print.

• A creative who needs the pyramid: the bench to delegate to, the account layer to absorb the client, the review chain to dilute the blame.

• Someone whose taste is a shopping list. We know the Rimowa. We know the kettle.

• Anonymous. Your name goes on the work. If that sentence reads as a threat, it just saved us both a phone screen.

THE DEAL

Compensation is senior and scoped in the first conversation. The role is remote; Space is based in New York, and the work is based wherever you're sharpest. This is the fourth chair, working directly alongside Nathan Roth (co-founder and CEO, a 6x CMO, the one behind Hinge's "Designed to be Deleted"), Sarah Masel (strategy for startups and for Google, Chase, and Goldman Sachs), and Haynes David (ex-Red Antler partner whose client work spans the NBA, AllTrails, and Eight Sleep). No layer between you and any of them, or between you and the client. Every tool we've built is yours on day one, along with the standing expectation that you'll break at least one of them by asking for something better.

THE HONEST CAVEAT

One option means the option is yours. No juniors means no one inherits the blame. Weeks mean the market grades the work while you still remember making it. Every constraint here was installed on purpose, and each one removes a place to hide. If a hedge is how you sleep, the three-option agencies are hiring too.

HOW TO APPLY

No cover letter. No 90-page portfolio PDF. Send three things to hello@sp-ce.co:

1. One piece of work you shipped and now hate, with the reason. Two hundred words max.

2. The best idea you ever killed, and why it deserved to die.

3. One thing in culture right now that makes you jealous.

Use AI to write it if you like; we do. We'll be able to tell whether you reviewed it.

The best brands are arguments with the way things already look. So is this agency.

Come argue.

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Yes, this job description was drafted with AI. A named human rewrote it, cut a third of it, and will defend every line on a call. That's the entire model, and it's hiring.