--- title: 'AI Creative Director at Valid' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/ai-creative-director-valid-san-francisco-mctkjg5f1yp9' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-05' --- # AI Creative Director at Valid - **Company:** Valid - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valid/1075a844-29e0-4fcf-9d95-6e6a8ece2a5e ## Job description ## ABOUT VALID A little about us: We’re Valid, Valid isn’t just a performance or content agency. We’re a product-driven creative company with an in-house engineering team that builds tools to test, learn, and scale what works. We combine strategy, creative, and AI to turn insights into systems, helping brands move faster and make better decisions across every channel. ## THE ROLE This is a senior leadership role for someone who can sit at the center of client growth, creative performance, and internal execution, and make all three move faster. Your job is not simply to oversee deliverables. Your job is to make sure the work we put into client accounts wins. That means understanding the client’s business deeply, recognizing that what they ask for is not always what they actually need, and having the strategic confidence to redirect, refine, and shape the work into something that outperforms what is already running. You must be equally comfortable: - leading creative direction, - building testing strategy, - pitching directly to clients, - managing high-level relationships, - pushing back when necessary, - and translating all of that into clear internal execution. This is a hands-on operator role. You cannot lead this from above. You must know how to build strategy, create strong concepts, understand AI production, and step into the work yourself when needed. The team should move faster because your expertise is in the room. This role sits at the intersection of: creative leadership, performance strategy, client trust, and speed. The pace is aggressive. Clients move fast. Ad accounts move faster. So do we. ## WHAT YOU’LL ACTUALLY OWN Client Strategy & Relationship Leadership You will be the senior strategic voice on key accounts. That means understanding each client’s business model, offer, funnel, and performance landscape, knowing what is working and failing in their account, and identifying where creative can become the growth lever. Clients will often tell us what they think they need. Your job is to identify the real problem underneath the ask and guide them toward the right solution. You should be able to command trust quickly, pitch with confidence, and build relationships that make clients want to follow your lead. Creative Performance Direction You are responsible for ensuring the creative strategy is built to outperform. This means: - building testing plans around real account opportunities, - identifying which hooks, offers, formats, and angles should be attacked next, - steering concepts toward performance over subjective preference, - and making sure every batch of work has a strategic reason for existing. You are not approving ads because they look good. You are approving ads because you understand why they should win. The expectation is simple: our work should beat what the client was running before we got there. Internal Team Leadership You will lead internal creatives, editors, strategists, and producers with speed and clarity. You must be able to take a messy client conversation, extract the strategic signal, convert it into actionable briefs, sharpen weak ideas, and keep production moving without bottlenecks. You are the connective tissue between client expectation and final output. Pitching, Selling & Expanding Trust This role is highly outward-facing. You should be able to present concepts persuasively, defend strategic choices, handle skepticism, and continually reinforce that we know how to make accounts perform. Strong communication matters here as much as strong creative instinct. Long-term retention often comes down to whether the client believes we see opportunities they do not. ## WHO THIS IS FOR This is for someone who: - understands performance creative deeply, - thinks strategically beyond what is asked, - can lead clients without becoming a yes-person, - can lead teams without babysitting, - can pitch with conviction, - and thrives in a fast, demanding environment. This is not a clock-in, clock-out role. Priorities shift. Problems appear. Speed matters. The people who thrive here are the ones who know how to solve, adapt, and keep moving. ## About Valid ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Valid is an AI-native, full-stack ad agency that combines AI-generated creative, automated media buying, and custom data infrastructure to manage the entire advertising lifecycle for mobile apps, B2B SaaS, and e-commerce brands. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed-stage; raised $7.3M total, including a $5.5M seed round led by Canaan Partners) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed (team grew from 5 to 40+ in the last 12 months, suggesting a founding around 2023–2024) - **Founders**: Not publicly disclosed ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Advertising / Marketing (AI-enabled ad agency) - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprise consumer brands, mobile apps, e-commerce); clients include Replit, Tolan, HoneyHomes, Rover, Quittr, SettleMate, Wayk - **Mission / purpose**: “Make sophisticated advertising accessible to businesses of all sizes” and build an agency meant to last 100 years. ## Products & Services - **Performance Creative**: Fully AI-generated short-form video ads engineered to drive sales; 20+ creatives per month, concept-to-account in 3 days. - **AI-Influencers**: Custom-branded influencer accounts with real posts, real following, and full organic reach; includes whitelisting and partnership rights; 20 posts per month. - **Media Buying**: Deployment and management of client ad spend across Meta, TikTok, TV, Google, Snap, AppLovin, and more; continuous optimization of targeting, placements, and budgets. - **Custom Performance Dashboard**: Cross-platform analytics connecting to Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap, and all DTC attribution sources; includes a chat-with-your-ads MCP server. ## Market Standing - **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company) - **Key Metric**: Total funding $7.3M (seed); team headcount grew from 5 to 40+ in the last 12 months; $1B+ cumulative ad spend deployed across major platforms - **Notable Investors / Partners**: Canaan Partners (lead), Neo, JVentures, Steve Huffman (CEO of Reddit), Scott Banister (inventor of search ads) - **Growth Signals**: Double-digit month-over-month growth; enterprise clients with real budgets at scale; case studies show –84% CPA cut, +1,156% profitable spend scale, 2.2x blended ROAS ## Competitive Advantages - **Full-stack, AI-native approach**: Engineering, creative, and media buying operate as one tightly integrated team, enabling faster iteration and compounding learnings. - **Custom internal tooling**: AI agents, data pipelines, and a proprietary dashboard that give marketers full visibility and automation – not just off-the-shelf SaaS. - **Outcome-driven model**: Valid charges based on performance (ever-positive returns on ad spend), aligning incentives with clients. - **Pixar-like creative production**: Uses AI video generation tools (Kling, Seedance) combined with human intuition to produce ads that convert. ## Strategic Focus - **Scale the team and platform**: Aggressively hiring across engineering, AI, creative, and marketing to extend the AI-native agency model. - **Deepen automation**: Building AI agents that make a single marketer as effective as a 20–30 person agency team. - **Expand into new verticals**: Already serving mobile apps, B2B SaaS, and e-commerce; aiming to make sophisticated advertising accessible to businesses of all sizes. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Fast-paced, startup intensity with cross-disciplinary learning – engineers gain advertising intuition, media buyers think in systems, creatives read performance data. - **Remote / Hybrid**: Remote-friendly with synchronous PT hours; product and engineering teams prefer in-person at the San Francisco Union Square office. Two-thirds of the team is remote. - **Perks**: - Competitive base salary + equity - Excellent medical, dental, and vision insurance - 401(k) - Unlimited PTO - Lunch stipends for in-office employees - $1,000 equipment stipend - Team off-sites (e.g., Honolulu and Las Vegas in 2025) - **Tech Stack**: Claude Code/CoWork, Kling, Seedance, Cursor, Linear, PaperClip – you’re expected to try new tools. - **Diversity of roles**: Senior Software Engineer, Principal Engineer, AI Creative Director, Creative Strategist, Performance Marketing roles, and more. ## Sources 1. [valid.co/careers](https://www.valid.co/careers) 2. [valid.co](https://www.valid.co/) 3. [linkedin.com/company/validco](https://www.linkedin.com/company/validco) 4. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/valid/__5aY_jcKNbRFNhmLl20JnBD_jWYcGgXd6LHGzg-sVghc) 5. [valid.co/valid-seed-round](http://valid.co/valid-seed-round) ## Other roles at Valid - [Product, Performance Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/product-performance-marketing-valid-zk0b7qz4cqq5) - [Digital Strategist, Performance Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/digital-strategist-performance-marketing-valid-san-francisco-xds4p4br4xh0) — San Francisco, CA - [App, Performance Marketing Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/app-performance-marketing-analyst-valid-san-francisco-w51x3b35fp3y) — San Francisco, CA - [Growth & Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-operations-lead-valid-san-francisco-rdmebzgtscd1) — San Francisco, CA - [Creative Strategist, UGC](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-strategist-ugc-valid-san-francisco-ytc3tbatwg13) — San Francisco, CA - [AI Creative Director, Ads](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-creative-director-ads-valid-san-francisco-04d6c1kx2t4g) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-valid-united-states-ny1dmzp5z0b7) — United States - [Principal Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-valid-united-states-z2egxk5baqnd) — United States