Motion Designer

Sarvam; United States; On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Sarvam seeks a motion designer to define the motion language for its AI brand. You’ll shape timing, entrances, transitions, and how the gradient travels, and you’ll document reusable patterns for the next assets.

You’ll lead end-to-end motion across films, web interactions, and product micro-interactions, then hand off specs to engineers with animations in After Effects, Premiere, and design tools, while exploring AI-assisted workflows.

Qualifications

• 3+ years in motion design, with reel showing narrative work and product/website delivery.
• Deep After Effects skills: shape layers, expressions, rigging; editing in Premiere or Resolve.
• Figma is non-negotiable; motion starts inside the design system.
• Illustrator and Photoshop used for asset creation and cleaning.
• Fundamentals of motion: timing, weight, staging, anticipation, and type behavior.
• Native fluency with AI tools in a professional motion workflow.
• System thinking: extend a static identity into motion and align with guidelines.
• A real stake in Indian design: focus on authentic Indian motion aesthetics.

Responsibilities

• Define the motion language: timing, easing, entrances, transitions, how monogram and gradient move; document for reuse.
• Make the films: concept, boards, animate, edit, sound, deliver end-to-end.
• Make the product move: web animations, scroll behavior, UI micro-interactions, demos.
• Hand off to engineering: provide SFX, Lottie, Rive, sprite sequences, or specs engineers can build.
• Solve visualising speech: animate voice agents across 11 Indian languages with real motion logic.
• Use AI properly in pipeline: generative video, previz, upscaling, and variant creation.
• Collaborate across the company: work with design, marketing, product, research, founders.

Skills

3+ years

Deep After Effects

Figma

Illustrator

Photoshop

Fundamentals of motion

AI tools in motion

System thinking

Stake in Indian design

Tools

After Effects

Premiere

Resolve

Figma

Illustrator

Photoshop

Job description

About Sarvam

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

Sarvam’s brand is already an argument about motion — it just hasn’t been allowed to move yet.

The monogram is a gateway that emerges — layered circles resolving out of mandala geometry into a single threshold form. The palette isn’t a set of swatches; it’s a continuous run from blue to orange, built to suggest progression and responsive state. Both of those ideas are about change over time. Both are currently being made mostly in stills.

We want the person who resolves that. Not someone to animate a logo once for a launch, but someone who decides how this brand behaves — how it enters, how it responds, how a gradient moves without becoming wallpaper — and then builds that language across films, web and product.

It’s a rare brief: a real identity with real motion logic baked into it, and nobody has run at it yet.

What you’ll do

• Define the motion language, not just the motion. Timing, easing, entrances, transitions, how the monogram behaves and how the gradient travels — documented and reusable, so the next fifty assets don’t start from zero.

• Make the films. Model launches, product announcements, research drops, event opens, brand pieces. Concept, board, animate, edit, sound, deliver — you’ll own the shot end to end.

• Make the product move too. Web animation, scroll behaviour, UI micro-interactions, demo and walkthrough videos. This is the half of the role that keeps the other half honest: motion that ships inside a live surface has constraints a film doesn’t.

• Hand off cleanly to engineering. Lottie, Rive, sprite sequences, or a spec an engineer can actually build from. Work that dies in After Effects doesn’t count.

• Solve the hard one: visualising speech. Our products are conversational — voice agents across 11 Indian languages, code-switching mid-sentence. Showing listening, thinking, speaking and switching, without falling back on a generic waveform, is the most interesting motion problem in the building.

• Use AI properly in the pipeline. Generative video, boards and previz, roto, upscaling, variation. You should already be doing this, with a clear sense of where it saves a week and where it costs you the shot.

• Work across the whole company. Design, marketing, product, research, founders. Rough briefs, hard launch dates, and work that still holds up at the end of it.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years in motion design, in-house or at a studio, with a reel that shows both narrative work and work that shipped inside a product or website.

• Deep After Effects. Shape layers, expressions, proper rigging — not template-and-swap. Plus real editing chops in Premiere or Resolve.

• Figma is non-negotiable. Motion here starts inside the design system, not beside it.

• Illustrator and Photoshop at working depth — you’ll be building and cleaning your own assets.

• Fundamentals over flourish. Timing, weight, staging, anticipation, and how type behaves in motion. We will notice your easing curves.

• Native fluency with AI tools in a professional motion workflow, and a point of view about it.

• System thinking. Evidence you’ve taken a static identity and extended it into motion — or taken a motion system somewhere its guidelines hadn’t gone.

• A real stake in this. You should care specifically about what Indian design deserves to look like in motion — and be a little impatient that it mostly doesn’t look like that yet.

Bonus points

• 3D — Blender or Cinema 4D, especially for abstract systems, geometry and product visualisation

• Real-time or code-based motion: Rive, three.js, GLSL, TouchDesigner, Houdini

• Sound design and mix — or at least strong instincts about audio driving picture

• Indic typography in motion: animating Devanagari, Tamil or Kannada without breaking the letterforms

Why Sarvam

Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar

• High ownership and high impact, from day one

• Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems

• You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates

If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.