The Role
You’re a designer in the midst of refining your craft — generating ideas, shaping identities, and learning through making.
At Koto New York, you’ll work alongside a deeply collaborative creative team, designing brand systems with care, intention, and ambition. You’ll contribute to projects from early exploration through execution, helping bring culturally relevant brands to life with clarity and craft.
This is a role for someone hungry to grow: creatively, strategically, and as part of an in-person studio community.
Your Responsibilities
- Develop thoughtful, original ideas — and communicate them with confidence, visually and verbally
- Design across typography, color, symbolism, illustration, iconography, and art direction, composing these elements into complete identity systems
- Collaborate closely with the team around you, learning from senior leaders and supporting more junior designers
- Contribute to client presentations and begin building your voice in how work is shared
- Engage with immersion and strategic phases of projects, with curiosity about the thinking behind the design
- Bring a deep interest in branding and a desire to build work for the most impactful companies of today — and the founders shaping tomorrow
- Take ownership of your role, applying feedback with intention as you continue to develop
- Manage your time and deadlines with growing independence
- Work fluently across Figma, Adobe Creative Suite, and Pitch
- Be excited to work in person at our New York studio, contributing to the team's culture and rhythm.
Our Responsibilities
- We will ensure you have meaningful and regular access to your manager to support your personal development and career trajectory.
- We will actively reward performance with promotions, pay increases, and a discretionary annual bonus of up to 10% of salary to all employees.
- We ensure Koto is an equal environment for all its employees.
- We will support you in taking family leave and offer significant paid maternity and paternity.
- We will actively encourage you to take 25 days of vacation annually, in addition to US bank holidays and a studio closure over the winter holiday.
- We will contribute up to an additional 4% to anyone who contributes to our 401 (k) plan.
- We offer a monthly ‘employee wellness’ benefits package of $100 per month through Juno.
- We offer access to YCN and fund relevant training opportunities to any employee looking to develop themselves and their career.
- We reward five years of service with $5,000 and five days of vacation. We reward ten years of service with $10,000 and four weeks' vacation.
- We will give you the opportunity to work from any of the four Koto studios globally, for a set time period, with appropriate planning and application.
Our Culture
- At Koto, we encourage our team to be ‘rationally optimistic’ about the potential of our work, our clients, their businesses, and the power of brand.
- We pursue the best briefs, want to inspire meaningful work, and, for those interested, provide an opportunity to make the work of their lives. We are actively cultivating leadership, culture, and spaces to encourage this.
- We work in person, with an optional WFH day on Friday and an additional two weeks of remote work per year. We believe this produces the best work, mentoring opportunities, collective learning, and culture.
- We encourage autonomy for each member of our team, allowing them to manage their own time, hours, and personal commitments to complete their work.
