Sr. Industrial Designer

Firefly Technology•New York, NY

7d•$115,000 - $140,000•Onsite

About The Position

Firefly is building the defining American safety company. In a world where schools, hospitals, hotels, and workplaces still rely on fragmented legacy systems, Firefly is replacing that stack with a single AI-native platform for physical safety. We're combining delightful hardware with intuitive software to create a system people trust and rely on every day and during an emergency. In just 18 months, Firefly has grown from an idea to protecting everything from boutique hotels to 30,000-student school systems, raising over $27 million along the way. The company is built by leaders from Apple and Verkada who care deeply about craft, speed, and building technology that matters in the real world. We're building for people who want to work on hard problems with exceptional teammates, ship relentlessly, and define an entirely new category from first principles. In under a year, Firefly went from a handful of sketches to a tooled product suite — custom PCBs, finished skins, hardware in hand. Idea in February 2025; shipping product by January 2026. That timeline is almost unheard of in industrial design, especially for tooled enterprise tech hardware. Most industrial designers wait two-plus years to see their first product reach the market. Here, you'll ship several. We're hiring a senior Industrial Designer to own the next chapter of that velocity — and to shape not just how Firefly's devices look and feel, but how the entire product experience hangs together across the physical hardware and the digital platform around it. You'll have real authority over how a defining American safety brand shows up in the hands of the people who use it. We're open to candidates who lean more strategic or more form-forward. The ideal hire can flex both ways; we'd rather meet a range of strong people than over-narrow the search. This is an in-office role based in our New York City office. You should apply if: You want to ship, fast. Most ID careers are measured in years between sketch and shelf. Here it's months. Your work lands in customers' hands, not just in a portfolio. You think in experiences, not just objects. You can hold the device, the install moment, and the app in your head at once — and design across all of them rather than only the object on the bench. You're equally curious about form and the person holding it. You're as comfortable in CAD or in front of a Keyshot render as you are running a user interview and turning what you heard into product direction. You want to be with the best. You'll work alongside teammates from Apple, Verkada, and Pentagram who care deeply about craft and speed, and ship relentlessly.

Requirements

Candidate likely has ~5 or more years of professional industrial design experience, ideally including time on a tooled enterprise or commercial product that actually shipped
A portfolio with work you carried from concept through production — not just concept renders
Proficiency in CAD — Onshape or SolidWorks preferred
Strong Keyshot rendering skills
Sketching as a daily tool — for working through problems, developing form, and illustrating concepts to teammates and stakeholders
Hands-on experience with 3D printing for prototyping and iteration
Comfortable working with a high degree of autonomy: you can scope your own work, run multiple parallel projects, and ship without close oversight
Strong written and verbal communication — you can present work, defend choices, and bring stakeholders along

Nice To Haves

Experience drafting user research studies and running qualitative interviews, particularly for physical products
Comfort synthesizing interview feedback into clearly defined, defensible user needs
A bluesky brainstorming practice — generating, visualizing, and pressure-testing far-out concepts
Concept visualization sketching that can carry an idea from the napkin to a stakeholder room
Experience at an enterprise hardware, IoT, or connected-device company where the device and the software ship together
Exposure to hospitality, healthcare, education, public safety, or other regulated or trust-driven markets

Responsibilities

Lead industrial design across the Firefly product line — from sketch and bluesky concept through CAD, prototype, tooling, and launch
Shape the holistic product experience: how the physical device looks and behaves in space, and how it connects to the digital platform that lives alongside it
Sketch fluently — to think through problems, develop form, and bring teammates and stakeholders into a concept fast
Model in CAD (Onshape or SolidWorks preferred), render in Keyshot for reviews and stakeholder alignment, and prototype hands-on with 3D printing
Plan and run user research — drafting studies, conducting qualitative interviews with installers, operators, and end users — and convert what you hear into product decisions
Define and defend user needs based on what came out of the field, not what we assumed at our desks
Partner closely with mechanical engineering, electrical, software, and marketing to keep form, function, and experience locked together as the product matures
Set the bar for industrial design craft at Firefly as we scale