Visual Designer

Location: Chicago, IL (or remote for extremely well-qualified candidates)

Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office

Reports to:Client Delivery Lead

Starting Salary: $87,000-$106,400 and equity

Tavern Research is a political tech startup that builds tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, like content generation and survey research. We're a venture-backed, mission-driven, fast-moving, mostly technical team focused on supporting winning campaigns. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

You're a creative Swiss army knife — skilled at video production, but versatile across visual design. You're part editor, part designer, part systems thinker. You spot what’s off, fix it, and build the process that prevents it from slipping again. You like clean lines, clear logic, and work that tells a clear story. 

You're scrappy and motivated, ready to grow in a role. You think about templates, file organization, and how to scale good creative judgment. You like building repeatable systems that still leave room for taste.

You're fluent in design and editing tools and fast at incorporating feedback. You thrive under deadlines, take critique well, and know how to elevate something from good to great. Experience in political or policy spaces is a plus, but what matters most is your ability to communicate complex ideas visually and clearly.

This is a hybrid role that blends video editing, graphic design, and slide deck development, with a core focus on refining and elevating machine-generated content. You’ll work across Tavern’s visual output — ads, websites, decks, campaign materials, and internal docs. Most projects will start with AI-generated drafts. Your job is to apply the human judgment, design instincts, and taste that turn raw output into work that feels intentional, persuasive, and alive.

You’ll collaborate with our research and strategy, working within our delivery team to transform data and messaging into sharp, compelling visual communications. One day, you might be editing a short video; another day, you might be designing a graphic or refining a visual framework that helps the team move faster while maintaining high quality. You’ll partner with our Client Delivery Lead, communicating directly with clients about scope, timelines, and technical constraints.

You’ll help build the creative systems we rely on for our core business: defining aesthetic standards, developing templates, organizing file libraries and b-roll, and strengthening the company's overall visual backbone. When demand for our video ads is lighter, you’ll shift into broader design work, ensuring you’re consistently contributing across our full creative pipeline.

In short, you’re part designer, part editor, part systems builder. You set the creative standard, uphold it across every project, and build the processes that help the whole team reach it. Experience working with polling data, content testing, or campaign messaging is a plus, but not required.

To be explicit: you don’t need a degree to work here. You just need to be exceptional at the things we’re asking from you.