Deputy Director, Global Brand Experience

Deputy Director, Global Brand Experience

The Deputy Director, Global Brand Experience is responsible for how Gates Foundation brand and stories are expressed to external audiences.

Reporting to the Director of Content & Campaigns, this role leads the Foundation's global brand, creative direction, visual identity, storytelling ecosystem, and creative production—ensuring every public interaction with the Foundation builds trust, inspires care, and reinforces our belief that everyone deserves the opportunity to live a healthy life and reach their full potential.

The Deputy Director leads a multidisciplinary creative studio, bringing together creative producers, story developer, visual and experiential designers, and audience engagement specialists who design, produce, and activate the Foundation's public-facing stories, exhibits, and experiences. The role is responsible for setting the team's creative vision, growing its capabilities, and ensuring every discipline works together to create cohesive, audience-centered experiences that connect people emotionally to the Foundation's mission.

The Deputy Director serves as both a strategic brand leader and the Communications Division's senior creative leader—setting the creative vision for the Foundation's public brand, elevating design excellence, and ensuring every experience reflects the highest standards of craft.

Working across regional communications, campaigns, channels, advocacy, leadership communications, and external partners, this role helps translate the Foundation's mission into experiences that people remember, trust, and want to share.

This role is anticipated to travel up to 25% domestic and international.

What You'll Do

Lead Creative Direction & Design Excellence

• Serve as the Communications Division's senior creative leader, establishing a compelling creative vision for how the Foundation's brand is expressed across every audience touchpoint.
• Provide executive creative direction across campaigns, storytelling, digital experiences, exhibitions, activations, environmental design, and emerging brand experiences.
• Champion exceptional visual craft and design quality, ensuring all work reflects world-class standards of creativity, accessibility, and audience-centered design.
• Steward the Foundation's visual identity and creative expression while encouraging thoughtful innovation that keeps the brand culturally relevant.

Build Creative Excellence & Organizational Capability

• Lead and develop a multidisciplinary team of creative producers, story developers, and visual and experiential designers responsible for creating and delivering world-class creative work across the Foundation's stories, brand experiences, exhibitions, activations, and communications.
• Lead creative excellence across the full creative lifecycle—from ideation and creative development through design, production, and execution—ensuring every output reflects exceptional strategic thinking, craft, audience relevance, and brand quality.
• Build long-term internal creative capability by strengthening creative leadership, design judgment, storytelling, production expertise, and multidisciplinary collaboration across the team.
• Foster a culture of creative excellence through rigorous critique, continuous learning, experimentation, and operating models that enable consistently outstanding creative work.

Champion the Global Brand Strategy

• Steward the Foundation's brand positioning, creative platform, audience strategy, and brand architecture across all public communications.
• Lead the continued evolution and implementation of the Gates Foundation's global brand strategy to build trust, increase care for our mission, and strengthen public understanding of who we are and why we do our work.
• Ensure all brand expression reflects the Foundation's values of collaboration, optimism, innovation, rigor, and inclusion while remaining locally relevant across markets.
• Serve as the principal advisor to Communications Division leadership on brand strategy, governance, and evolution.

Lead Brand Systems & Visual Design

• Lead the ongoing evolution of the Foundation's visual design system across physical, environmental,…