Lead Industrial Designer

Overlay•Oakland, CA

23d•$150,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Overlay is building the world's first intelligent makeup robot, aiming to revolutionize beauty application through robotics, perception, and design. As a venture-backed, pre-launch startup, they are creating a new category of personal robotics that blends self-expression with engineering. The system operates directly on the human face, demanding exceptional precision, safety, and real-world robustness. The company is based in Oakland and is seeking an industrial designer to shape the physical product experience that customers will interact with, touch, and trust.

Requirements

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.