Animator & Motion Graphics Designer

Description

About the company

The company is your product’s context layer. It ingests and stores your analytics, errors, replays, and business data so you and your agents can query and act on it.

We've since shipped more than a dozen products, including:

A suite of analytics and observability tools, including product analytics (the company's site), replay vision (the company's site), AI observability (the company's site), and error tracking (the company's site)

The company MCP (the company's site) for users and their agents to query and act on their product and business data

Data warehouse (the company's site) so users can query product and customer data together using custom SQL insights.

We are:

Product-led. More than 500K organizations have installed the company, mostly driven by word-of-mouth. We have intensely strong product-market fit.

Default alive (https://paulgraham.com/aord.html). Revenue is growing incredibly quickly, and we're very efficient. We raise money to push ambition and grow faster, not to keep the lights on.

We're set up for a long, ambitious journey.

We're focused on building an awesome product for end users, hiring exceptional teammates, shipping fast, and being as weird as possible (the company's site).

Things we care about

Transparency: Everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, our strategy, and how we work, in our public company handbook (the company's site). Internally, we share revenue, notes and slides from board meetings, and fundraising plans, so everyone has the context they need to make good decisions.

Autonomy: We don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what's going to have the biggest impact on our customers, and what they find interesting and motivating to work on. Engineers lead product teams (the company's site) and make product decisions (the company's site). Teams are flexible and easy to change when needed.

Shipping fast: Why not now? (the company's site) We want to build a lot of products; we can't do that shipping at a normal pace. We've built the company around small teams – autonomous, highly-efficient groups of cracked engineers (the company's site) who can outship much larger companies because they own their products end-to-end.

Time for building: Nothing gets shipped in a meeting. We're a natively remote company. We default to async communication – PRs \> Issues \> Slack. Tuesdays and Thursdays are meeting-free days (the company's site), and we prioritize heads down building time over perfect coordination. This will be the most productive job you've ever had.

Being weird: Weird means redesigning an already world-class website for the 5th time. It means shipping literally every product that relates to customer data. It means building an objectively unnecessary developer toy (the company's site) with dubious shareholder value. Doing weird stuff is a competitive advantage. And it's fun.

Why this role at the company now?

We have a strong brand and a lot of strong content for you to build on. What we don't have (yet) is someone whose whole job is making it move.

You'll be the company's first in-house video animator, and the creative engine behind everything that moves in our visuals.

We take video seriously (although we’re not really so serious (the company's site)). Our Video team ships documentaries, product launches, ads, social shorts, and more.

Right now, there’s no single owner of motion at the company, so the effort comes from several people, each with their own style, and most animation gets added at the very end of post-production. It doesn't move like one brand.

Your job will be to give it one. You'll be the creative engine behind the company's animated visuals. Your fingerprints will be on how the company moves, everywhere, but primarily in video.

This isn't a pure motion graphics role. We need someone who can also draw. You'll eventually design and illustrate your own assets as well as animate them, and sometimes you might even ship illustrations that never move at all.

Simply put, you care about the craft, have opinions about what makes animation great, and have a showreel that proves it.

What you will be doing

The work spans product launches, feature trailers, changelogs, social shorts, minidocs, animated ads, GIFs on our website, and even icons inside the company app. One day you might be working out how the hedgehog walks; the next, rebuilding our UI in 3D for a launch.

Styles range from clean motion graphics to fully illustrated, character-led animation. If your showreel only has one style in it, this probably isn't the role for you.

We expect you to be:

Defining how the company moves. You'll shape our motion and animation language more or less from scratch, and you'll bring strong opinions about it to the table.

Bringing the hedgehog to life. Our beloved mascot is a 2D, static hedgehog. You'll illustrate and animate it, and work out how it walks, reacts, and shows its personality in motion.

Being the go-to person for motion in video. Documentaries, product launches, screen-recorded tutorials, changelogs, social short-form. Sometimes you'll work hand in hand with Alex (the company's site) (Video Producer) and Lottie (the company's site) (Graphics Lead); other times you'll take an animation-only piece from idea and script all the way to delivery on your own.

Making our product look good in motion. Recreating and reimagining the company UI in 3D space for "screenshare-plus" visuals, and animating icons that live inside the app itself.

Building the toolkit. Animated logos, brand elements, lower thirds, transitions, and motion templates that make every future video faster to produce.

Working beyond video. Motion for ads and campaigns, GIFs and animated icons for the website, and pure illustration work alongside our Graphics team.

Example public projects

PopQuiz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeU5MmpqBg0)

Changelog (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkiiahgoLCU) (in different styles (https://youtu.be/eSICQg2Wak))

Hackathon documentary (https://youtu.be/dGaSxBs3OsU)

Small Teams (https://youtu.be/clHDEg9xsvg)

The company in Slack (https://youtu.be/SaVTePqaPeM)

Eggplant animation (https://youtube.com/shorts/l-C-FmjHBQk?feature=share)

What you won't be doing

Executing someone else's storyboard frame by frame. You'll get briefs, not blueprints, and we'll expect you to have ideas of your own.

Cutting full videos. We have editors for that. Knowing your way around an edit helps, but it isn't the job.

Picking one house style and never leaving it.

Making corporate explainers where a flat-shaded person waves at a laptop.

You’ll fit right in if:

You’re advanced in After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Fresco is a bonus.

You have a strong portfolio demonstrating technical excellence, a clear creative point of view, and a wide variety of styles (motion graphics, illustration-led animation, character work).

You have illustrated / designed and animated motion graphics. You design and draw your own assets rather than only waiting for someone to hand you files to move.

You originate ideas. You've taken work from concept to delivery: come up with the idea, written the script or voiceover, then animated it.

You’re a highly creative artist with strong personal standards for quality. You care about the craft.

You have a strong opinion about what the best animated film of all time is, and are able to defend your decision to the death. (It's either The Incredibles or Coco.)

Requirements

• You have created content for developer communities or technical audiences.
• Basic video editing. Enough to rough out how your animation sits in the cut.
• You have translated product UI / UX into animated assets.
• If you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you - we're happy to accommodate!
• LI-DNI
• Experience: Any (new grads ok)
• Visa: US citizen/visa only