Motion Designer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

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.

The work

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.

The work

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.

Who they want

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.

Nice to have

BONUS POINTS

• 3D — Blender or Cinema 4D, especially for abstract