Become a Typography Designer.

2D Game Artists produce every visual asset players see in a mobile or casual game — character sprites, environment tiles, UI chrome, HUD elements, and the animation frames that bring them to life. In India, the role sits at the intersection of the mobile-casual explosion (Moonfrog Labs, Junglee Games, Octro, Nazara Technologies, Mech Mocha) and a growing indie freelance economy on ArtStation. Day-to-day work oscillates between high-craft concept art that defines a game's visual language and production-line sprite-sheet assembly that must hit precise performance budgets — texture atlases packed under 2048×2048, mipmaps verified, PVRTC/ASTC compression tested on actual Android devices. The path in is almost entirely portfolio-driven: a tight ArtStation book of game-ready character sprites, one Spine 2D rigged character, and a packaged UI kit outweighs any formal degree in most Indian studio hiring rounds.

Visual Merchandisers in India control the physical retail experience — from the window display on a Zara India or H&M high street storefront to the planogram governing every fixture inside a Westside, Lifestyle, or FabIndia outlet. The job sits at the intersection of spatial design, consumer psychology (AIDA framework), and brand storytelling: a VM translates a seasonal brief into mannequin styling, prop arrangements, signage hierarchy, focal-point architecture, and in-store navigation that drives footfall conversion and average transaction value. In India the two strongest employment tracks are brand-side in-house (Reliance Retail's Trends/AJIO Offline, Tata Trent/Westside, Shopper's Stop, FabIndia, Anita Dongre, Apple BKC) and international fast fashion (H&M India, Zara India, Mango India). Senior Visual Merchandisers own regional rollouts — executing identical festive theme windows across 60+ doors in a Diwali push — while Heads of VM at national chains shape the in-store identity across hundreds of SKUs and store formats. Entry runs through NIFT or Pearl Academy graduates with 2-5 years of floor-level experience; the craft itself is learned on shop floors, not in classrooms.

Character designers are the visual architects of personalities — they translate a director's or writer's character brief into a complete visual identity that works at every scale, from a 32px game icon to a 4K animatable asset. In India, the role sits across Toonz Animation (Thiruvananthapuram), Green Gold Animation (Hyderabad, home of Chhota Bheem), Reliance Animation, DQ Entertainment, and an accelerating freelance economy for global animation and game projects via ArtStation and LinkedIn. The craft demands simultaneous fluency in storytelling (can the personality read in 5 seconds?), technical constraint (does the design rig cleanly? does the silhouette read at 16:9 and 1:1?), and IP discipline (does every character look like it lives in the same world?). Unlike concept artists who range across environments and props, character designers go deep on the human or creature form — anatomy, costume language, facial expression architecture, and the iterative turnaround pipeline that bridges 2D design to 3D model or rigged animation.

Concept Artists define the visual world of games, films, and animated series before a single polygon is modelled or a set is built — characters, props, vehicles, environments, and creature designs exist first as hundreds of painted thumbnails, value studies, and colour passes on their screens. In India through 2026, the strongest demand comes from Lakshya Digital Pune (now Keywords Studios), DNEG Pre-Pro (Mumbai/Hyderabad), Sumo Group India, Dhruva Interactive Bengaluru, and an accelerating pipeline of US- and UK-paying remote contracts sourced through ArtStation and talent agencies. Film pre-production houses — Reliance Entertainment, Prime Focus World, and a growing slate of web series co-productions with Netflix India and Prime Video India — hire concept artists on project contracts that run 4–18 months. Entry-level concept artists typically enter through NID, IDC IIT Bombay, Srishti, or MAAC/Arena Animation programs, or from self-taught routes validated by an ArtStation portfolio that demonstrates value, anatomy, and perspective fluency. The career is technically and creatively demanding: a senior who paints convincingly across environment, character, and vehicle simultaneously and works efficiently inside AAA pipelines (Blender blockout → photobash → paintover) commands export-tier salaries from US studios.

Design Systems Engineers own the React (or Vue/SwiftUI) component library, design token pipeline, and documentation infrastructure that every product team builds on. The role sits squarely at the intersection of design and engineering: you translate Figma variables and Tokens Studio exports into Style Dictionary token transforms, maintain Storybook with Chromatic visual-regression baselines, enforce ARIA and axe-core accessibility contracts, and govern versioned releases via Changesets. In India, dedicated DSE roles exist at Razorpay (Blade design system), PhonePe, Cred, Swiggy, Flipkart, and at global product companies with India engineering hubs — Shopify India, Atlassian India, and GitHub India all run active design-systems squads. The role demands rare fluency in both design judgment and production-grade TypeScript; a pure frontend engineer who can't critique token semantics and a pure designer who can't write a compound component with polymorphic types will both hit a ceiling here.

Footwear Designers in India translate trend research and biomechanical constraints into commercially viable shoes — working across the full spectrum from mass-market PVC chappals for Relaxo and Khadims, athletic shoes for Decathlon's design team, leather office-shoes for Bata and Liberty, and women's fashion heels for Metro Brands, Inc.5, and Catwalk, to new-gen D2C premium labels like Aprajita Toor and direct-to-consumer plays under Bewakoof's accessory lines. The craft sits at the intersection of industrial design (last selection, sole engineering, EVA foam specification) and fashion design (seasonal trend boards, colourways, vamp proportion, silhouette). Most Indian footwear designers pass through the Footwear Design and Development Institute (FDDI, Noida/Kolkata/Chennai/Jodhpur) or the National Institute of Design Ahmedabad, with CLRI (CSIR-Central Leather Research Institute, Chennai) providing the technical-material science complement. The industry employs roughly 4.5 million people in production and a far smaller (and underserved) population of trained designers — making mid-to-senior design talent genuinely scarce at established brands.

Elixir Developers build fault-tolerant, concurrent, and real-time systems on the Erlang BEAM virtual machine using the Phoenix framework, OTP supervision trees, and GenServer/Supervisor behaviours. In India through 2026, the role is niche — concentrated at companies building real-time chat (Hike, Pepper Chat), live-streaming infrastructure, fintech event-streaming, and at the India arms of global companies like Discord, Adobe Behance, Pepsico Digital, and moomoo that chose Elixir for its actor-model concurrency without the callback hell of Node.js. Remote-first hiring from European and US product companies (remote.com, Duffel, community.com, AppSignal) routinely brings $80-140K USD salaries to India-based senior Elixir engineers. The stack demands genuine OTP fluency — GenServer state machines, Supervisor restart strategies, ETS in-memory tables, Broadway for event ingestion, Oban for background jobs, and Phoenix LiveView for real-time server-rendered UI — that separates real practitioners from developers who've only read the Getting Started guide.

Senior: N/A

Backend developers at Indian product companies build the server-side APIs, payment flows, and data systems behind apps like Razorpay, Cred, Zerodha, Meesho, and Swiggy. Day-to-day work spans REST/GraphQL APIs in Node.js, Python (Django/FastAPI), Java (Spring Boot), or Go; database query optimisation on Postgres/MySQL; Redis caching; Kafka/RabbitMQ event pipelines; and AWS/GCP infra. India-specific patterns include UPI/Razorpay/PayU integrations, RBI-mandated data localisation, peak-load handling for IPL/flash sales, and US-export SaaS teams that overlap 4-8 PM IST with American counterparts. Compensation at Indian product cos (Razorpay, Cred, PhonePe, Zerodha, Postman, Atlassian Bangalore, Adobe India, Microsoft India) is 2-4x higher than at services firms (Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Cognizant), with ESOPs adding meaningful upside at growth-stage startups.

Senior: ₹70.0L

MLOps Engineers productionize machine-learning systems — model serving, feature stores, training and inference pipelines, drift and quality monitoring, CI/CD for models, and the rollback machinery that keeps a recommender or fraud detector reliable at 3 AM. The role sits at the intersection of ML, backend engineering, and DevOps: you write Python and Go services, build training pipelines on Airflow or Kubeflow, deploy models on Kubernetes or SageMaker, instrument feature drift and prediction monitoring, and own SLOs for inference latency and model freshness. In India through 2026, MLOps is one of the highest-paid technical specializations because the combined ML + production-ops skill set is rare. Concentrated demand sits at fintechs (Razorpay, Cred, PhonePe, Paytm), B2B SaaS (Freshworks, Postman, Atlan, Hasura), AI-native startups (Sarvam AI, Krutrim, Yellow.ai), and the GCCs of Microsoft, Google, Walmart Global Tech, and Goldman.

Senior: ₹75.0L

Biochemists in India sit at the intersection of pharma R&D, clinical diagnostics and basic life-science research — the highest-leverage employers are pharma majors (Dr. Reddy's, Cipla, Sun Pharma, Lupin, Biocon, Aurobindo) doing drug discovery and bioassays; CSIR network labs (CDRI Lucknow, IICB Kolkata, IICT Hyderabad, NCL Pune, CCMB Hyderabad); ICMR institutes (NII Delhi, NIN Hyderabad); university PhD programmes at IISc, AIIMS, JNU, BHU, IIT Bombay/Madras; and hospital-based clinical biochemistry labs at AIIMS, PGIMER, CMC Vellore, Apollo, SRL. Entry runs through CSIR-UGC NET / GATE-XL / DBT-JRF / ICMR-JRF for academic paths and direct campus + walk-in interviews for pharma R&D. Industry pays 2-3x academic; academic offers job security, ARS-equivalent stability, and the CSIR scientist track.

Senior: ₹35.0L

Build and operate the internal developer platform — the CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, service mesh, secrets management, observability stack, and IaC modules — that every other engineer in the company ships on. Platform engineers turn raw cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) into a paved road: a developer pushes code, the platform takes it from commit to canary to production with logs, metrics, and rollback baked in. In India, the role is concentrated at product unicorns (Razorpay, Zerodha, CRED, PhonePe, Swiggy), GCCs of global firms (Microsoft, Atlassian, Stripe, Walmart Global Tech), and SaaS companies scaling past 200 engineers — typically the point at which a dedicated platform team starts paying for itself in shipping velocity.

Senior: ₹65.0L