Managing Art Buyer - Illustration & Animation (Fixed-term Contract)

Summary

The International Content Design team conceptualises, designs and creates the content experiences for some of Apple’s most visible products. Your ideas can impact the way people consume media products, what they look and feel like and how they’re used by millions of people across the globe.

Description

Our Art Buying team commissions world-class illustration and animation across the App Store, Books, Music, and Podcasts, partnering with extraordinary artists to create work that reaches hundreds of millions of people around the world. We're looking for a creative leader to join us on a 12-month fixed-term contract, to guide this talented, globally distributed team through a defining and exciting chapter.

This is a role for a confident, visible leader, someone who advocates fiercely for their team, sets a high creative bar, and brings the clarity and energy a distributed team needs to thrive. If you're the kind of leader people want to follow, and you're energised by championing brilliant people doing brilliant work, we'd love to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Lead and champion a distributed team of Senior Art Buyers, a Co-ordinator and a Resource Specialist across London, Tokyo and Sydney.
• Set clear direction, keeping the team motivated, focused and delivering to a high standard.
• Advocate for the team, upward and cross-functionally. Securing resource, protecting priorities, and representing their work to senior stakeholders.
• Own the operational rhythm: workflow, prioritisation, quality and delivery across all our divisions.
• Manage across timezones with the structure and empathy a global team needs.
• Support individual growth, development and performance through genuine coaching conversations.
• Steward budgets, artist and vendor relationships, and commissioning standards. Always championing fair rates and respectful collaboration with creative partners.
• Carry forward initiatives including onboarding, knowledge-sharing and internal education resources to continue supporting our Art Directors.
• Help the team adopt and embed new workflow tooling (Airtable) into their day-to-day operations.
• Navigate complex cross-functional collaborations internally, protecting the team’s creative standards and artist relationships, while being mindful of conflicting cross-functional timing demands.
• Translate creative briefs into clear, digestible objectives for internal and external partners.

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience managing and developing creative or design operational teams. Experience managing an art buying team is ideal.
• Experience managing distributed or remote teams across multiple timezones.
• A track record of strong stakeholder management, balancing competing needs across lines of business and communicating persuasively at senior levels.
• Demonstrated ability to advocate for a team’s priorities, resource and standards.
• Comfort with navigating ambiguity and frequently changing conditions, with a bias toward setting a clear course.
• Experience with complex budget handling and negotiations.
• High emotional intelligence. The ability to read a room, manage sensitive dynamics, politics, and keep morale high under pressure.
• Skilled in delegation and in identifying where to balance a team’s independence with shared support.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in art buying, commissioning, creative production or a related creative-operations field.
• An understanding of the commercial art world: Agencies, artists, rates, licensing, and the complexity of creative deliverables.
• Familiarity with Airtable or similar project management tools.
• Experience collaborating across cultures and working styles.
• Literacy in AI ethics as they relate to artists’ rights and commissioning practices.
• A genuine interest in illustration, animation and design.
• Knowledge of artwork licensing and contracts.