Executive Design Advisor

About the Team:

Our Product & Design org spans Growth, Marketplace, New 0—> 1 bets, and Operations — building the experiences that connect chefs to the millions of people who eat their food every week. Design sits at the center of how we translate that mission into a product people love using.

The role:

CookUnity is looking for a design leader to elevate both the craft and the velocity of our design organization and consumer experience — starting in an advisory capacity. This is a mandate to shape the aesthetic bar for a fast-scaling consumer brand, elevate how the product expresses our brand identity, communicates our unique value proposition, and modernize how our design organization works in an AI-native era.

We're not looking for a figurehead. We're looking for someone who still has strong opinions about pixels, has run design orgs through real scale, and has already rewired how their teams work with AI-assisted tools — not as an experiment, but as standard practice. 

Responsibilities:

• Own the vision for the brand visual identity and bring the essence of CookUnity to life through a differentiated design system that shapes all consumer touchpoints
• Bring a proven aesthetic sensibility from a top-tier B2C consumer brand and apply it to CookUnity's product surfaces, informing both day-to-day craft and our longer-term design language.
• Refine key elements of the brand identity system to up-level craft, refinement, and meet the needs of an expanding ecosystem of channels and activation formats
• Define CookUnity’s approach to visual storytelling across marketing surfaces and key consumer touchpoints like packaging
• Ensure design consistency and brand cohesion throughout the marketing funnel and consumer journey to maximize brand equity and recognition
• Diagnose where our design org can leapfrog in adopting AI-assisted workflows (Figma AI, generative design, prompt-to-design pipelines) and where the industry is heading, and build a credible, sequenced uplift plan.
• Coach new tools and workflows into daily practice — pairing directly with our design team on real projects, not just delivering a slide deck of recommendations.
• Partner closely with Product and Marketing leadership to ensure design strategy is tightly linked to product and business priorities.

Qualifications:

• VP or CDO-level experience at a top-tier, high-craft B2C consumer brand, with a track record of shaping product design at scale.
• Proven experience building and leading high-performing design organizations.
• Genuine fluency in AI-assisted design tooling (Figma AI, generative workflows, prompt-to-design pipelines) — you've already integrated these into a team's real practice, not just piloted them.
• A coaching mindset: able to walk into an existing team, diagnose gaps without demoralizing people, and bring them along — part teacher, part champion, part operator.
• Ability to leverage generative AI to increase output quality and speed.

Preferred requirements:

• Experience in food, wellness, marketplace, or subscription consumer businesses.

Learn More About CookUnity

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we're looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we'd love to connect.  Compensation for this role is open for discussion based on advisory capacity and time commitment.