Senior Packaging Designer

Bakery is looking for a Senior Designer to Make Things people Want. We’ve worked with ambitious brands like Nike, Diageo, Shiner Beer, and Grillo’s Pickles - building brand identities, campaigns, and packaging that make people pay attention.

We’re seeking a Senior Packaging Designer who shares a passion for FMCG, CPG, and brand design at its best - someone equally fluent in the creative and the technical sides of the craft. You’ll need a sharp eye for brand storytelling and structural design in equal measure: comfortable moving between flat layout work in Illustrator and Photoshop and thinking in three dimensions about how a shape, fold, or container actually performs on shelf.

You should know your way around print production - CMYK, Pantone, foil, finishes - well enough to design with the realities of manufacturing in mind, not just the polish of a comp.

At Bakery, our Senior Designers work closely with Strategists and the Client Services team while supporting our Creative and Design Directors. You’ll have the chance to inspire our design team, mentoring junior designers and helping them sharpen their craft.

Your creative instinct will show up in how you turn strategy into ideas that stand out on shelf and hold up across every touchpoint a brand lives in.

* Must be employable in the USA and work on-site in Austin, TX *

Bakery is an independent creative and culture agency designed to ignite people’s obsession in great brands. From our headquarters in Austin, TX, we work with Nike, Grillo’s Pickles and Cheetos to build brand worlds, campaigns, packaging, and the kind of craft that makes people stop. Bakery is a 4x AdAge Small Agency of the Year.

• Work on iconic consumer brands, shaping packaging that carries real shelf presence and cultural relevance
• Create holistic concepts and design solutions that build on a brand’s identity and give it a genuine point of difference across every touchpoint
• Demonstrate a clear understanding of how to connect strategy to craft
• Quickly edit and refine concepts to land on the strongest idea, not just the safest one
• Manage relationships with vendors and production partners - printers, structural engineers, prototypers - to make sure the work holds up from final file to finished package
• Collaborate with internal teams and client expertise to arrive at better creative solutions than either side would reach alone
• Operate with the integrity, reliability, and openness that earns trust from clients and colleagues alike
• Act as a creative partner to clients, building long-term trust rather than one-off approval
• Push back on and interpret feedback where needed to protect the integrity of the brand
• Bring design expertise and point of view to client conversations, including productive provocation when the work calls for it
• Look for opportunities to deepen and extend client relationships over time
• Deliver strong pitches and client presentations that move the work forward
• Communicate clearly and confidently across all levels, adapting style to audience while staying consistent in message
• Encourage collaborative, cross-functional ways of working across the studio

• At least 6 years of packaging design experience
• Skilled at creating holistic packaging and brand concepts, from idea through final production
• A portfolio with real examples of work on iconic FMCG or CPG brands
• Strong grasp of structural packaging design - how shape, fold, and container form work in three dimensions, and how a design needs to hold up physically as well as visually on shelf
• Proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign) for flat design, plus working knowledge of 3D visualization tools like ArtiosCAD or Cinema 4D to see a design as a real object before it’s produced
• Working knowledge of print production - CMYK, Pantone matching, foil stamping, and special finishes - and how different substrates (paper, plastic, metal) affect how a design actually prints and reads
• An eye for consumer psychology - what makes a shopper stop and pick something up in the first three seconds on shelf
• Awareness of regulatory and labeling requirements (ingredients, barcodes, safety warnings, recycling…