Senior Product Designer | Manufacturing and Defense

Gecko Robotics•Boston, MA

36d•$153,000 - $192,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Product Designer to join our Manufacturing team and design at the unique intersection of physical factory floors, hardware constraints, and cutting-edge physical AI. This is a high-impact, non-traditional role where you will translate firsthand customer insights into strategic product direction, building systems that directly strengthen America’s industrial base. Your work will span human-operated and autonomous robotic Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) data collection systems, alongside the collaborative platforms where customers, suppliers, engineers, and analysts make mission-critical decisions. By bridging the gap between complex material health data and intuitive workflows, you will create tools that improve process, increase throughput, and ensure the quality of safety-critical, high-value components. As a key member of the Manufacturing team, you will work day-to-day with strategists, engineers, field operators, and customers to define not just how a feature looks, but what is worth building and why it matters. You will frequently travel to customer sites, anchoring your designs in the real-world environment of the factory floor and collaborating directly with users who may be adopting this category of technology for the very first time. This role requires a highly autonomous, curious, and user-centered designer who thrives in ambiguous environments and takes proactive ownership of a project.

Requirements

Experience owning complex, end-to-end product spaces.
Deeply curious about users, technology, systems, and how work happens outside the software.
Independent enough to push your own work forward and collaborative enough to push the team's work forward.
Ability to translate direct customer conversations into scalable product thinking.
Understands complex technologies and can articulate credible product solutions.
Energized by the blurring lines between design, product strategy, engineering, and customer discovery.
Comfortable working within technical environments, with the ability to prototype or contribute directly to code when it is the fastest path to product clarity.
Experience in design for industrial, robotics, data-heavy, enterprise, or other complex technical domains.

Responsibilities

Work directly with users in customer organizations, often at their plant, forge, or shop.
Collaborate with robotics teams, product strategists, and engineers to understand workflows, constraints, failure modes, and opportunities.
Build mental models of manufacturing workflows, NDT data, robotics workflows, and customer decision loops, then communicate them clearly.
Use sketches, prototypes, diagrams, research, product narratives, AI-assisted code, or whatever artifact aligns the team and drives decisions.
Shape how design works inside Gecko: independent, collaborative, customer-grounded, technically fluent, and oriented toward progress.
Develop firsthand understanding of customer domains, mental models, workflows, and operational realities.
Turn field learning and customer feedback into product concepts that scale beyond a single user or customer.
Ship improvements to real users and iterate based on what happens in the field.
Raise the bar for product clarity, user empathy, and execution quality.