You see, here is the thing, you don’t know that you don’t know. That is OK, it is exactly how you should be, your only experience in design is what, 3-4 years in an academic setting and a few months on internship maybe?
They want to take some risks, but they don’t want to invest in an experienced design director and a design team, but instead only a fresh grad? This would be the first red flag to me. Sounds like they want to feel like they are taking risks without really taking much of a risk.
In the parlance of our times it is called paying your dues. Often the first job is not about glamour, it is about getting into a situation where you can continue to learn, contribute, and leverage that in a few years when you are ready to move on… then you can work for the guys with no design team, because you will know how to do it.
I know it is tempting. A few years ago a major European consumer electronics company asked me to consider being VP of design. VP at 33! Very, very tempting. I asked them a lot of questions, questions they had not thought of in terms of how I would be judged, the kind of team I could build, the reporting structure… and after weeks of agonizing I decided not to do it. I understood that I did not know enough, that I wasn’t done working at my level, and that a similar opportunity would present itself when the time was right.