Video Editor & Graphic Designer

We're looking for the person who opens our creative brief, reads what we wrote, and comes back with something better than what we asked for.

If your instinct on getting a brief is to fill the order exactly as written, this role will frustrate both of us. We want the editor who asks why the hook isn't landing and proposes a stronger one, who remembers the b-roll we shot two projects ago and pulls it into this week's Reel, and who sends us a trend on Tuesday that we hadn't seen yet.
We're hiring one person to do that across video and design.

Who we are
The Assist is a newsletter for professional women navigating the full complexity of career and life, reaching 300K+ engaged readers. We publish four editions a week (OG Tuesday, Wellness Wednesday, ThirstyThursday, and The Weekender), each built for a different moment in her week, and we're building out our Instagram presence to match what we've built in email. We're small, we move fast, and we care a lot about craft.

We give readers the specific move, not just the concept. Tactical guidance, honest perspective, whole-person support: written by women, for women, never corporate.

The role
You'll work as an embedded member of our creative team on a contract basis. You'll sit inside our process, know our brand as well as we do, and have opinions about it.

Two jobs in one seat:
Video (roughly 70% of the work). Cutting Instagram Reels, and building the template system that lets us produce them at volume.
Design (roughly 30%). Finishing our brand identity and building carousel templates our team can run without you. This is ideal but not required.

What you'll deliver each month
8-10 Instagram Reels
Ongoing additions to our Reel and carousel template library
Proactive ideas: trends, formats, and hooks you think we should try

How our process works
Our campaigns live in a Notion database. Each campaign contains a creative brief for a Reel, and inside that brief you'll find b-roll, script ideas, and the preset templates we want used.
Raw footage and brand assets currently live in Google Drive, but we're just getting started with video, so you'll help us shape the process as we go.

You pull the brief, cut the Reel, and send it back. Along the way we expect you to talk to us:
“Can you shoot b-roll of X? It would make this opening land.”
“Have you seen the latest trend of X? You guys should try it.”
“You used footage two campaigns ago that fits this. Want me to pull it in?”
“This hook isn't strong enough. Here are two alternates.”

The video work, specifically
We want our video brand identity to feel like our newsletter has come to life: fun, witty, and full of big-sister energy. We're here to motivate, teach, share, and collaborate. We're all learning together, and the editing should feel that way too.
We want videos that are in this kind of style:

Talking-head editing that stays natural while feeling finished. One locked-off shot, soft natural light, mic visible on purpose. The energy comes entirely from the cutting.
Invisible jump cuts. Tightening speech in-frame so the pace lifts without feeling choppy, fast and dense without ever feeling jarring.
L-cuts and J-cuts. Audio leading or trailing the picture so transitions land smoothly.
Headline typography as the scroll-stopper. Oversized, all-caps, stacked, centered, with color used intentionally to reinforce the point being made. This is the single most important skill for this role.
Caption styling with real taste in type. Something like a light serif set phrase-by-phrase, not the default karaoke preset most editing apps default to.
Screenshot and cutout overlays. Drop-shadowed, slightly rotated, clustered as visual evidence inside the frame.
Restraint with stickers and emoji. Sparse accents that punctuate a moment and then get out of the way.
Sound design that serves the edit. Little to no music bed, closer to wall-to-wall voiceover, with pace coming from the speech and the cutting rather than a track underneath it.

The design work, specifically
This role covers both finishing our brand identity and turning it into templates our team can run without you. That's two different skill sets, and we're looking for someone who can do both.

Brand strategy
Finish our brand identity. We're about 85% there. We have a couple of different brand guidelines in place that need to be merged into one cohesive document, with the judgment calls that requires (what stays, what goes, what's the actual system) rather than just formatting an existing decision.

Production
Build carousel templates. Reusable, on-brand, and simple enough that our interns and virtual assistants can produce from them without design training.
Create visual assets we can rebuild ourselves. Everything you make should be handed over in a form our team can edit and extend.

Tools
Required: Adobe Premiere Pro, CapCut, Notion.
Also needed: After Effects, Descript, Canva, Illustrator, plus a willingness to bring in other tools we haven't discovered yet.

You should be
Fluent in short-form vertical video, with a portfolio of Reels or TikToks you cut yourself
Genuinely good with type. Most of this job is typography moving in time
Comfortable being told "here's the brief, make it better"
A self-starter who can help us see what's possible with video, since we don't know everything about it ourselves
A clear communicator in writing, since most of our back-and-forth will be async
Organized enough to build systems other people can use, and to hand over files in a state they can pick up
Active enough on social media that trends reach you before they reach us
Available on Slack with hours that overlap the Pacific Standard Time team, and open to the occasional quick scheduled video call when async isn't enough

You'll stand out if
You've built a template system that a team actually adopted and kept using
You've worked on a newsletter, media brand, or creator-led business
You have a point of view about our current Instagram and tell us what you'd change
You've helped shape a brand identity and can walk us through the thinking behind it
You send us an idea we hadn't thought of before we've even hired you

The arrangement
Independent contractor, month to month.
Monthly retainer depending on skillset and experience, tied to the deliverable goals above.
Work made for hire, standard ownership terms.
Either side can step away with 30 days' notice.

How to apply
Apply through this listing and reply with two or three Reels or TikToks you personally cut, ideally similar in style to what we're going for. If they're already visible on your profile or portfolio, feel free to just point us there instead of re-sending them.