Senior Technical Art Director: AI-Driven Visual Systems

Tavern Research:
Technical Art Director LOCATION

Chicago, IL

$127000 - $147300 (Yearly)

Employer-sponsored health insurance offered

Tavern Research

Digital

Other

Departmental Staff (a role in a specific department. Ex: Organizer, Finance Assistant, Social Media Manager)

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Technical Art Director

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

Office: 3 days/week in South Loop office

Reports to: Principal, Video Team

Employment Type: Fixed-term, benefits eligible, contract through end of 2026 cycle, with strong potential to convert to permanent

About Tavern Research

Tavern Research is a political tech startup building tools and insights to help our customers win elections and make better, evidence-based decisions. We specialize in scaling expert human work, such as content generation and survey research to support thoughtful, data-driven civic engagement. We're a venture-backed, mission-driven, fast-moving, and mostly technical team focused on supporting campaigns and organizations working to strengthen democratic participation.

We are experimental by design and expect every team member to continuously improve how they work using new tools and technology. Everything else is on our website. If you still have questions, let us know when you apply!

About You

You have an eye. You’ve spent years editing, designing, and shipping creative work that had to perform, not just look nice, and you’ve developed instincts that hold up under deadline pressure.

You’re unusually technical for a creative lead. You know your way around at least one programming language (Python, HTML, CSS, preferably JavaScript), and you think about asset libraries the way a senior engineer thinks about shared infrastructure: build it once, build it well, and let the whole team move faster.

You’re AI-native. You know how to direct machine output the way a good director runs a shoot: knowing exactly what you want, recognizing it when you see it, and pushing past the first few drafts to get there.

You thrive in fast-paced, high-output environments and understand what makes persuasive creative effective. You’re comfortable iterating quickly, giving and receiving thoughtful feedback, and collaborating closely with technical and cross-functional teams, and giving thoughtful, direct feedback that makes the work better. You care about quality, momentum, and the mission.

About the role

This is a senior creative role with real ownership. You’ll establish Tavern’s visual standard across every ad, video, and deliverable we ship, and you’ll build the systems that let a small team produce work at the volume and quality our clients pay for.

Most of our creative pipeline starts with AI-generated drafts. Your job is to define what “good” looks like, then encode that standard into tooling that governs on-screen text rendering, color grading, transitions, graphic treatments, and the broader visual practices that keep our output consistent. You’ll partner closely with engineers to turn your creative judgment into generalizable, scalable code.

Day to day, you’ll move between hands-on creative work and systems building. You’ll cut and polish ads that clients are spending real money to put in front of voters.

This role is structured as a fixed-term contract through the end of the 2026 cycle, with strong potential to convert to a permanent position based on fit and business needs. We’re looking for someone who’s ready to make an impact from day one and grow with us.

Responsibilities

• Write and maintain technical creative brief files that codify our approach to on-screen text, color grades, transitions, graphic treatments, and visual best practices. The goal: consistent, high-quality output across the whole team.

• Direct AI-generated creative drafts to a finished, persuasive standard, and continuously improve the prompts, references, and pipelines that produce them

• Partner with engineers to translate creative judgment into shared…