About Us;
Saras AI is the world's first AI-only higher studies institute based in the United States. We are on a
mission to create the most student-centric higher education institution globally, offering degrees exclusively in AI for both students and working professionals. Our founding team comprises industry experts from the US and India, united by a shared vision to make high-quality AI education accessible to everyone, with a personal touch of humanity. This is an in-office role based out of Gurugram.
WHAT YOU'RE INHERITING
Saras AI Institute has a brand identity that's partially built and partially consistent. The logo is strong. The colour system exists. Beyond that, it's improvised different people, different tools, different taste levels, no shared language for what Saras should look like. Saras is right now a culmination of the best of minds across tech. A consistent design language is needed.
The Design Lead will be the first person to own this fully. That means building the system from the ground up (or formalizing what works and burning what doesn't) and then producing from it at volume. This is not a consultancy engagement where you deliver a brand book and leave. You will design the carousel on Tuesday and update the brand guidelines on Friday.
The audience you are designing for is a 29-year-old backend engineer who has strong opinions about monospace fonts, thinks most marketing looks desperate, and whose design taste was formed by whatever interface they spent the most time in probably a dark-mode IDE, a well-designed game, or a dev tool that someone clearly cared about. Design that looks corporate to an engineer is worse than design that looks minimal. We'd rather look like a well-maintained open-source project than a coaching institute.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
The brand system build it, maintain it, defend it
- Audit the existing visual identity. Document what stays, what gets rebuilt, and why. Not a vague moodboard exercise a clear system with rules other people can follow.
- Define and maintain: colour system, typographic hierarchy, grid, spacing logic, iconography, illustration style, photography direction, and the rules for when we break any of these.
- Build the component library in Figma that the team, freelancers, and future hires can execute from. If you have to explain the same visual decision twice, that's a template that doesn't exist yet.
- Be the person who says no when something goes out that shouldn't. Brand governance is part of this role.
Production a lot of it, at speed
- LinkedIn carousels: 35 per week across the B2B and B2C tracks. Each one is a designed editorial object, not a slide deck with a colour applied. They need to work on mobile, read fast, and look like something an engineer would pause on. You already have a team here.
- Long-form asset layout: whitepapers, AI maturity reports, B2B research sheets, corporate brochures, student outcome decks. You're not just applying styles you're thinking about information hierarchy and how an engineering manager reads a document.
- Presentation decks: programme overview decks, investor decks, masterclass slide sets, CTO pitch decks. The standard here is: a senior engineer opens this and doesn't immediately close it.
- Email templates, event creatives, landing page assets, and whatever else the campaign calendar produces. The pace is real. You build templates that make the pace manageable.
Visual direction not just execution
- Improve the briefs you receive. If a content brief is visually underspecified, your job is to push back and make it better before you start.
- Develop a visual vocabulary for Saras that feels native to engineers: data visualisation done well, system diagrams that actually clarify rather than decorate, the kind of typographic rigour that makes technical people trust what they're reading.
- Stay current on design in spaces engineers respect Stripe's docs, Linear's product UI, Vercel's marketing, Lenny's Newsletter layout, anything Figma ships that other designers notice. This is your reference universe, not Behance trending.
Build for scale
- Source and brief junior designers when volume exceeds capacity. Write briefs that produce good output without your direct involvement. This is a skill separate from design.
- Document your decisions. The next person who touches this brand should be able to read what you wrote and understand why the system works the way it does.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
The signal that matters most
You have a BTech. You are not working as an engineer. Somewhere along the way probably during college, possibly before you got obsessed with how things look and feel. Maybe it was game UI. Maybe it was modding. Maybe it was building tools for a hobby project and caring disproportionately about the interface. Maybe you just spent too much time in well-designed software and became incapable of tolerating bad design.
The reason the BTech matters is not credentials. It's that you understand systems. You understand why something breaks. You understand that the person opening your carousel has spent the day dealing with actual complexity, and they have a finely calibrated detector for design that's trying too hard. Your job is to design for that person. You can only do it well if you've been that person.
Non-negotiable
- B.Tech / B.E. CS, IT, ECE, or adjacent. You started somewhere technical.
- 36 years in graphic design, brand design, or editorial design. Portfolio must show both: a brand system or component library you built, and production work (decks, carousels, reports) at real volume.
- Expert-level Figma. Components, auto-layout, variables, shared libraries. You should be genuinely faster in Figma than most people are in PowerPoint. We will notice.
- Strong typographic sensibility. Demonstrably. We will look at your type choices before anything else in your portfolio.
- Has designed a brand system before not applied someone else's, built one. Rules other people can follow.
Strong signal
- Gaming background you have played games where the UI was half the reason you stayed. You have an opinion about which game has the best inventory system. You have probably at some point looked at a loading screen and had feelings.
- Experience in developer tools, fintech, or SaaS you know what it means to design for buyers, not users, and you know the visual grammar of products that engineers trust.
- Can create data visualisations and system diagrams that are accurate and legible not pretty, legible. There's a difference.
- Motion design (After Effects, Lottie, Rive) is a real bonus. We will move toward animated content.
- Dark mode defaults. Not because it's required but because it says something.
WHAT THIS IS NOT
This is not a role for someone who calls themselves a designer because they use Canva for marketing. While you will be in the growth team, our objective is to be able to speak to engineers- even if just 100 per month. Scale is niche here.
It is also not a role for someone who produces one beautiful thing slowly. The content calendar is a machine. You build systems that keep the machine running without producing output that looks machined.
On aesthetic direction: no gradients from purple to teal. No abstract neural network backgrounds. No robotic hands holding glowing orbs. No font that says futuristic to a non-engineer. The aesthetic we're building is considered, technically serious, and slightly understated the kind of design that makes engineers feel like they're in the right place, not like they're being marketed at.
LOCATION & COMPENSATION
- Gurgaon in office, always. We brainstorm here and would like you to be present (also for your reportees)
- 36 years experience
- Compensation competitive with brand/design lead roles at B2B SaaS and tech companies in NCR
