Senior Motion Designer

Summary

Join Khan Academy's Design team as a Motion Designer to create engaging and impactful animations for our educational platform. This contract role (20 hours/week for 6 months, $80-100/hr) offers the chance to establish a new motion language for Khan Academy, collaborating with designers and engineers. You will work on in-app animations, document design principles, and contribute to a positive learning experience for millions of users worldwide. The ideal candidate possesses 4+ years of experience in motion design for digital surfaces, expertise in Rive, and strong communication skills. A portfolio showcasing relevant work is required for consideration. This is an opportunity to make a real difference in education.

Requirements

• Curiosity and a desire to learn!
• 4+ years of experience working on Motion for digital surfaces
• Please provide a portfolio of work that makes you proud!
• Strong communication skills (written and verbal)
• Excellent taste and also the ability to find compromise with business and technical needs
• Bias toward action–we’re DOING something great here, not just thinking about it!
• Introspective, mature, low-ego, and emotionally intelligent
• Growth mindset, willingness to learn and to teach others
• Proactively seek out the people/information you need to move work forward and unblock yourself
• High comfort level working within a strong top-down product and pedagogical vision led by our CEO, Sal Khan, and our Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, PhD
• Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next
• Comfortable with frequent change and ambiguous situations, like you’d experience in a startup
• Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script
• Excited about education and engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and why people learn

Responsibilities

• Work closely with our front-end engineering infrastructure team to define how visual and motion design impact the user experience
• Participate in the creation and maintenance of custom motion elements
• Communicate motion updates across design and engineering teams
• Document and establish proper motion design usage and approach for the product design team
• Work closely with our visual designer to determine when motion is critical to the user experience
• Participate in Design team critiques and team rituals
• Regularly tell the story of your work and why it matters, how it aligns to company objectives, how it drives meaningful engagement and learning

Preferred Qualifications

Strong preference for designers who have experience working in Rive and the ability to architect a complex Rive system