[Hiring] Freelance Creative Technologist, Applied AI @DEPT®

Role Description

Like us, you are passionate about both creative and technology. You sit at the intersection of design, technology, production and ongoing innovation. You have serious creative tech chops, with a focus on AI tooling such as:

• Replicate
• ComfyUI
• Weavy/Figma Weave
• Adobe Firefly
• Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (Nano Banana)
• Runway
• Others

Successful candidates will have a strong digital background and believe in the promise of enhancing craft with AI solutions.

You will be helping us define work of the future. With both hands-on digital creative design experience, including motion and video, and AI enablement experience, you have the ability to work with both clients and internal teams to help forge solutions that will take design to the next level. You should be comfortable with customizing/fine-tuning models, creating prototypes, and creative coding frameworks.

This person will join us as a key member of the AI team who will continually test new technologies, help train/customize solutions for internal and client use and educate staff and clients alike. You will report to the Director of Applied AI, Creative.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the creative team to determine how AI can best enhance their workflows and products.
• Build and manage end-to-end GenAI pipelines, including LoRA fine-tuning, embeddings, and sophisticated image, video, audio, and copy generation prompt chains and agentic workflows to generate high-fidelity, on-brand creative assets.
• Create tooling recommendations and implementation roadmaps for AI solutions.
• Explore emerging technologies AI, multimodal models, WebGL, creative coding, and help turn them into creative advantage.
• Audit existing creative workflows to find automation opportunities that speed up the creative process without sacrificing quality.
• Stay on top of key AI solutions for creative, attend demos and trainings as needed and pursue relevant partnerships.
• Provide ongoing AI education to the creative team.
• Help envision innovative solutions that will set DEPT apart.
• Support new business and client growth efforts as needed.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of agency experience in a design, production, or technology role.
• 2+ years of AI use/implementation/customization of creative tooling.
• Design fluency and a deep understanding of design systems in creative tools (Adobe Creative Suite, Figma).
• Technical ability to integrate AI model outputs into creative workflows via API orchestration and JSON data parsing using Python or JavaScript.
• Expertise in orchestrating multimodal foundation models (Gemini, GPT, Flux, and more) with precision-AI-steering tools like ControlNet, LoRAs, and node-based workflows (ComfyUI, Weavy).
• A strong POV on where AI makes sense - and where it doesn’t.
• Experience working with nationally recognized brands.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Strong collaboration skills.
• Experience navigating cross-functional teams and dynamics.
• Curiosity, creativity, and rigor.

Benefits

• Hourly rate of $75-95/hr, depending on experience.
• Healthcare, Dental, and Vision coverage.
• 401k plan, plus matching.
• PTO.
• Paid Company Holidays.
• Parental Leave.