The posting
ABOUT AVRIDE https://www.avride.ai
Avride builds autonomous driving technology for two kinds of vehicles: sidewalk delivery robots and robotaxis. Its robots already deliver food on US college campuses and city streets with partners like Uber Eats and Grubhub, and its robotaxis carry Uber riders in Dallas. In 2025 Uber and Nebius committed up to $375M to scale the business.
The technology is years ahead of the brand. Today Avride's identity is a logo, a palette and a font. There is no visual system and no shared language across social, PR, decks and the vehicles themselves.
The team is based in Austin, with robots and cars in a garage a short drive from the office. Design is small: one digital designer and one industrial designer. As the company grows, PR, bizdev and leadership need far more than one person can carry, so Avride is hiring its first dedicated brand designer.
WHAT YOU'LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR
- Enhance and develop the existing brand identity into a comprehensive visual system. Create communication templates that help non-design colleagues quickly build layouts, while leaving you room to work on more unconventional formats.
- Brand the robots and the cars: livery, branding points on the hardware, and content for the OLED/LED screens on the robots (and possibly on the next-gen car).
- Test your work on the real thing in the Austin garage, and sort out printing and production on site.
- Write guidelines with bizdev for partner advertising on the robots.
- Design the website, PR and marketing materials, and editorial and social formats, so that every launch and new city looks like the same company.
- Build the big decks for keynotes and investors. They're few, high-stakes and full of sensitive numbers, so you own them end to end.
- Create basic 3D visuals yourself, for example specs for visuals on the robots and cars. With today's AI and 3D tools this is very doable, even if 3D is new to you.
- Art-direct photo and video with limited resources, and write down how our robots and cars should (and shouldn't) be shot for press.
- Bring in and direct specialists for complex motion and high-end 3D: find them, brief them, keep the bar. About 80% of your time is hands-on, about 20% is coordinating this kind of work.
WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO SUCCEED
- Senior craft you can show: strong composition, typography and colour, made with your own hands.
- Brand systems, not just single assets. Your portfolio shows a system with guidelines that other people actually used.
- Range: print and outdoor, editorial, social, web and decks. You understand motion well enough to direct it.
- Basic hands-on 3D, or a real wish to learn it.
- A feel for photography: you can get consistent, good-quality shots without a big production.
- Ownership: you've set the direction of your work, not only executed someone else's.
- Comfort with speed and many requesters. Avride ships fast and tests in production; you prioritise with your manager and push back when needed.
- Confidence with strong opinions. Leadership cares a lot about visuals; you argue your point well, or commit to the decision.
- Strong spoken and written English. Slack and most meetings are in English.
- US work authorization and the ability to work from Austin, TX. Avride can't sponsor new visas.
HUGE PLUS IF YOU HAVE
- Taken part in a rebrand or built a brand system at an agency.
- Art-directed shoots or worked closely with photo and video production.
- Worked on physical products, vehicles, robotics or hardware, or at an AV company.
- A tech startup background.
- Interest in product design, for example the passenger screen in the robotaxi.
- A habit of automating routine work, including AI-assisted decks.
WHAT YOU'LL WIN
- Competitive base salary plus equity.
- The first brand role at the company: you set the system everyone else will use.
- Real robots and cars to design for and test on, not just screens.
- A lot of independence, light approvals and fast shipping to production.
- A flexible schedule with no fixed hours, in an Austin team close to the hardware.
WHAT'S GREAT ABOUT THIS ROLE
Few designers get to brand something that drives itself down the street. At Avride your work lives on robots on sidewalks, on cars in Uber's app, on stage at investor meetings and on LinkedIn the day a new city launches. The foundation is there, but there is no system yet, so your taste will shape how a whole category of product looks to the public.
It's also a hands-on role in a small, fast team. You won't manage a department or wait on approval chains. You'll make things, put them on the hardware in the garage, and see them in the world weeks later.
“Brand work rarely leaves the screen. At Avride it drives down the street, on robots and cars that real people see every day. This is a rare chance to be the first brand designer at a company with world-class technology and to shape how it looks to the world.”
— Elizaveta Bobkova https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizaveta-bobkova/ communication design lead, and hiring expert at hirehire
