Technical Illustrator (Contract)

Role & Responsibilities

HAUS is seeking an experienced freelance Technical Illustrator. The ideal person will be responsible for the following:

  • Illustrate Complex Technology Across Websites, Decks, and Sales Collateral: Create custom illustrations for deep tech clients across a full range of marketing deliverables — website hero and section illustrations, investor and sales deck imagery, product slick sheets, case studies, whitepapers, and social content. Your illustrations translate what a client's technology is and how it works into visuals that make the story land for investors, customers, engineers, and everyone in between.

  • Move Fluidly Between Editorial Style and Technical Precision: Deep tech clients need different things from illustration depending on the moment. Sometimes the answer is a stylized editorial illustration that captures a concept with personality and warmth. Sometimes it's a precise isometric view, cutaway, or exploded diagram that reads closer to a technical drawing than an editorial piece. You're comfortable moving between these registers and know which one serves each situation.

  • Design Illustrations That Live Within Client Brand Systems: Every client has a distinct visual identity, and your illustrations have to feel like a natural extension of it — not a stock library dropped into someone else's brand. You take the client's color, type, and visual language as your starting point and build illustration work that reinforces the identity while adding depth and specificity that a photograph or icon couldn't.

  • Work From Real Technical Source Material: Our clients supply engineering diagrams, CAD models, research papers, whiteboard sketches, and product photos — sometimes polished, often messy. You can read this material well enough to understand what you're depicting, ask sharp questions when something is unclear, and produce illustrations that are technically accurate as well as visually strong. A beautiful illustration of the wrong mechanism does more damage than good.

  • Editorial Thinking: Technical illustration is as much about deciding what to depict as  it is about deciding what to leave out. A cutaway of a rocket engine, a diagram of a fabrication process, or an illustration of a biological pathway can quickly become an unreadable mess if it tries to depict everything. You'll work with HAUS art directors, designers, and copywriters to figure out which parts of a system are worth drawing, which are worth simplifying, and which don't need to be shown at all.

  • Deliver Files Ready for Web, Print, and Motion Handoff: Deliver clean, well-organized vector and raster files that the rest of the HAUS team can build on — layered thoughtfully, sized appropriately for their intended context, and structured so that individual elements can be animated, resized, or repurposed downstream when the illustration needs to move or extend into new formats.

Requirements

  • Passion for Deep Tech: You must love deep tech and be genuinely excited by cutting-edge technologies.

  • Portfolio & Experience: Professional experience as an illustrator, ideally with a meaningful body of work in technical, scientific, or editorial illustration for real-world clients. Your portfolio must show illustrations of complex technical or scientific subjects — hardware, biology, physical systems, processes, spatial data — rendered with clarity and craft. Portfolios that are exclusively stylistic or character-driven are unlikely to be the right fit.

  • Illustration Craft: Strong grounding in the fundamentals. Draftsmanship, composition, color, light, and the ability to make a two-dimensional image feel structurally correct. You can render the same object in multiple styles and know which style each situation calls for.

  • Style Range and Adaptability: Demonstrated ability to work across illustration styles — editorial, isometric, technical cutaway, schematic, blueprint, and more — and to adapt your approach to fit different client brand systems. Illustrators with one signature style that they apply to every project are not what we're looking for here.

  • Technical Literacy: Genuine comfort reading engineering documentation, technical papers, and CAD or schematic references. You can look at a research paper's figures and understand enough of the underlying content to depict it accurately, and you know when to push back on a brief that would misrepresent the science.

  • Technical Proficiency: Expert-level Adobe Illustrator, plus strong Photoshop skills. Comfort with Figma for placing illustration work into design deliverables. Familiarity with 3D tools like Blender, Cinema 4D, or Rhino for reference-building or hybrid 2D/3D output is a strong plus.

  • Brand Fluency: Comfort working within an established brand system and extending it into illustration without losing the identity. You know how to translate a brand's color palette, type feel, and visual attitude into an illustration language that feels of a piece with the rest of the client's presence.

  • Attention to Detail: Precision matters. Misdrawn components, inaccurate proportions, and sloppy line work undermine the credibility of an entire piece,  especially with the technical audiences these clients need to reach. You take pride in illustrations that hold up to scrutiny from the engineers and scientists who supplied the source material.

  • Communication & Teamwork: Excellent communication skills. You can walk HAUS art directors, designers, and copywriters through your choices with clear rationale, take feedback without ego, and hand off files that the rest of the team can build on. Since our team is distributed, you need to be comfortable working remotely, collaborating via Slack and Zoom, and proactively communicating status and blockers.

  • Tech Savvy & Curiosity: A genuine passion for technology and innovation is important. Our clients are building world-changing tech in AI, robotics, biotech, aerospace, and more. Your enthusiasm for these domains will help you illustrate them with the depth and specificity they deserve.

Preferences

Experience handing off illustrations for animation is a plus. Familiarity with Rive, Lottie, or After Effects for illustrated motion content will help your work stand out. Any prior work in aerospace, defense, robotics, semiconductors, biotech, climate, energy, or industrial illustration will help you understand our clients faster.

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About HAUS

HAUS is the world’s first integrated public relations and creative services agency purpose built for deep tech startups and scaleups. In January 2022, we set out on a mission to accelerate the adoption of technologies that maximize freedom, material abundance, and human flourishing. Since then, we’ve had the opportunity to support more than 100 startups, scaleups, venture firms, research labs, and other organizations in industries including artificial intelligence, aerospace, biotechnology, climate, defense, energy, advanced manufacturing, quantum computing, semiconductors, robotics, and more.

Salary Range

Compensation

Competitive; depends on experience and market rates

Location

Remote

Benefits

Submit Your Resume

The best candidates will have read this entire job description and apply via this portal with a short note showcasing their excellence in their craft and enthusiasm for the specific type of work we do at HAUS.

Please keep in mind that we receive an overwhelming number of submissions that are written by AI. If you keep your note human and show that you actually care about what we are doing specifically here at HAUS, this will be strongly considered along with your application.

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