Lead Industrial Designer

Location: Oakland, CA

Department: Design

Location Type: IN_OFFICE

Employment Type: FULL_TIME

About Overlay

The Role

• You’ll take ownership of a new program that will get a lot of visibility when we launch.
• The product is genuinely fun to design for. Form, human factors, CMF, interaction, and retail experience are one canvas.
• The robot, consumables, accessories, and packaging will move under you over time but you’ll continue getting external support throughout our early manufacturing runs. 
• You'll work closely with the founder and engineering team, prototype at full scale, and see your decisions become real quickly.

What You'll Do

• Own Overlay's industrial design direction across new products.
• Lead the industrial design from requirements and concept selection through refined CAD, CMF, appearance models, and fabrication-ready design intent.
• Create sketches, storyboards, high-quality renderings, surface models, and full-scale mockups that make decisions concrete.
• Partner with mechanical engineering to resolve component architecture, packaging constraints, tolerances, assembly, cleaning, serviceability, and accessibility without losing design intent.
• Direct industrial design, model-making, and fabrication partners during the transition, with clear reviews, decisions, documentation, and handoffs.
• Carry design intent through DFM, supplier reviews, prototype builds, EVT, DVT, and PVT while establishing Overlay's internal industrial design tools and file standards.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years in industrial design, or an equivalent body of shipped work, with ownership from early concept through production.
• Advanced 3D CAD and surfacing skills in tools such as SolidWorks, Onshape, Rhino, or Alias, plus strong rendering and visualization ability.
• A portfolio with range: exceptional form development, proportion, detail resolution, CMF judgment, and work with personality.
• Strong working knowledge of materials, manufacturing processes, prototyping, ergonomics, tolerances, and DFM.
• Ease with ambiguity, change, and the occasional blank page — you set direction, make the work, and ship without an industrial design team around you.

Bonus Points

• Experience with consumer hardware, robotics, beauty devices, wearables, or other products that operate close to the body.
• Experience designing retail fixtures or attended service experiences.
• Knowledge of accessibility and human-factors testing for a broad range of users.
• Experience bringing industrial design in-house from an external agency or building an ID function from scratch.
• A real love of makeup, skincare, beauty, and its subcultures.
• Mandarin speaker. Some members are based in China and our weekly meetings include a mix of English and Chinese, with engineering team members traveling back and forth.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary & generous early-stage equity
• Best-in-class medical, dental & vision insurance
• 401(k) matching program
• Flexible Time Off with 10 paid holidays
• Commuter benefits
• Office in downtown Oakland near 19th Street BART station

The Team

• Small, fast-moving team with high ownership and low process
• Strong bias toward shipping, learning, and iterating quickly
• In-person collaboration in our Oakland office

Culture & Values

1. Move Fast, Move Smart: act quickly, with good judgment.
2. Ownership: see things through, from idea to result.
3. Disagree, Then Commit: talk it out openly, then row in the same direction.
4. Intellectual Honesty: be candid, stay curious, follow the evidence.
5. Show, Don't Tell: real, working results over talk.