Founding Designer

Overlay•Oakland, CA

6d•$155,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Overlay is building the world's first intelligent makeup robot, reimagining beauty application through robotics, perception, and design. As a venture-backed, pre-launch startup, we're defining a new category of personal robotics at the intersection of self-expression and engineering. Our system operates directly on the human face, requiring an unprecedented level of precision, safety, and real-world robustness. We've raised significant funding and we're a small, technical team building in person in Oakland. We're making something real that doesn't exist yet — and we're looking for a designer to create a brand that resonates deeply with customers.

Requirements

5+ years across brand and digital design, with shipped work in: brand identity, social/campaign creative, and product UI.
An AI-native workflow — tools like Midjourney, Figma AI, Runway, or Claude Code are part of how you work daily, and you have a point of view on them.
A portfolio with range: strong systems thinking and work with personality.
A feel for a premium, design-minded customer — taste that shows up in the details.
Ease with ambiguity, change, and the occasional blank page — you scope your own work and ship without a creative director.

Nice To Haves

Experience collaborating with industrial design or packaging partners — you know how to art-direct across physical and digital.
You've built a brand or design system from scratch at an early-stage company.
You can prototype in code, or use AI to get there.
3D modeling experience.
A real love of makeup, skincare, beauty, and its subcultures.

Responsibilities

Own Overlay's visual identity — logo system, typography, color, motion, art direction — and carry it across everything we make.
Design the product experience alongside engineering: app UI in Figma, from flows to polished shipped screens.
Create social and campaign creative natively for each platform, in partnership with our marketing lead.
Partner with our industrial design agency to keep the brand, product, and hardware feeling like one object of desire.
Build the design infrastructure (systems, templates, AI-assisted pipelines) that lets a small team produce like a big one.
Use AI across your workflow — generation, prototyping, production — and keep raising the bar on what's possible with it.