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Designer\- Graphic, Digital, and AI \| Job Description
Location: New York, NY
*Who are we?*
MATTE is a 360° full\-service creative studio at the convergence of hype, storytelling and design. We bring people together to inspire new ways of engaging, to provoke long term progress, and to entertain audiences around the world, while helping forward\-thinking brands and institutions nimbly and truly do the same. Our studio capabilities range from strategic ideation and insights, creative development, branding and identity, experiential, web design and development, campaigns and content creation, all the way through full\-scale production and execution.
*About this role:*
MATTE Projects is looking for a Designer with a strong foundation in graphic design, sharp digital instincts, and demonstrated skill and experience in AI programs and how its changing the creative process.
This is a mid\-level role for a multidisciplinary designer who can move comfortably between brand systems, campaign creative, presentations, social and content, digital experiences, and emerging AI\-driven workflows. While graphic design will be at the core of the role, we’re looking for someone who understands how design translates across digital environments and is excited to experiment with new tools and technologies.
The ideal candidate has excellent taste, strong typography and layout skills, and the ability to take a creative concept and develop it into thoughtful, polished design across multiple touchpoints. They should also have strong, hands\-on experience with generative AI tools, with the ability to effectively integrate AI into their creative process for ideation, visual exploration, prototyping, and execution—while maintaining a high standard of design craft and creative judgment.
This role will collaborate closely with Creative Directors, Art Directors, Designers, Strategists, Producers, and other teams across MATTE.
This role reports into the Design Director and is responsible for:
- Design across a range of creative projects including brand identities, campaigns, presentations, social content, digital experiences, experiential touchpoints, and new business pitches.
- Develop compelling visual systems rooted in strong typography, composition, color, imagery, and art direction.
- Translate creative concepts and brand systems across multiple formats and platforms while maintaining consistency and craft.
- Bring strong digital design capabilities to projects, including web, mobile, social, interactive, and screen\-based experiences.
- Collaborate with Creative Directors and Art Directors to develop concepts from early exploration through final execution.
- Create layouts, design systems, moodboards, visual explorations, mockups, and polished presentation materials.
- Work closely with experiential and production teams to translate graphic systems into physical environments when needed.
- Incorporate generative AI tools and workflows into the creative process for visual exploration, image generation, concept development, prototyping, and production.
- Experiment with emerging AI platforms and creative technologies, helping the team identify new ways to expand creative possibilities and improve workflows.
- Retouch, manipulate, composite, and refine imagery—including AI\-generated assets—to ensure final work meets MATTE’s creative standards.
- Prepare and organize design files for production, development, animation, fabrication, or other downstream teams.
- Manage multiple projects and deadlines simultaneously while maintaining a high level of attention to detail.
- Participate actively in critiques, brainstorms, and collaborative working sessions.
*Qualifications \& Requirements:*
- 3–5 years of professional design experience, ideally within a creative agency, design studio, brand, or similarly fast\-paced creative environment.
- A portfolio demonstrating excellent graphic design fundamentals, particularly typography, layout, composition, visual hierarchy, and brand thinking.
- Experience designing across both static and digital formats.
- Strong command of Adobe Creative Suite, particularly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
- Working knowledge of Figma and experience designing for digital platforms.
- Hands\-on experience with generative AI creative tools and an understanding of how AI can support visual development and creative workflows.
- Experience with tools such as Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Runway, Flora, ChatGPT, or similar emerging platforms is strongly preferred.
- Ability to move between established brand guidelines and more open\-ended conceptual assignments.
- Strong visual taste and an awareness of contemporary design, art, fashion, music, entertainment, technology, and culture.
- Ability to take feedback, iterate quickly, and contribute thoughtfully to a collaborative creative process.
- Strong organizational and communication skills with the ability to manage competing priorities.
- Curiosity and a willingness to experiment, learn new tools, and push beyond familiar design solutions.
- This role requires 4x days per week in office (Monday\-Thursday), remote work day on Fridays.
Compensation: This role offers a base salary range of $80,000–$95,000 annually, with final compensation determined based on experience, skills, and qualifications.
Everyone is welcome at MATTE \- we’re passionate about building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and creating an environment where our differences are celebrated. MATTE provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, MATTE will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.
Salary Context
This $80K-$95K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At matte projects, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400. This role's midpoint ($87K) sits 59% below the category median. Disclosed range: $80K to $95K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
matte projects AI Hiring
matte projects has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $95K - $95K.
Location Context
AI roles in New York pay a median of $220,000 across 1,650 tracked positions.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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