Staff Multidisciplinary Designer

Heron Power•Scotts Valley, CA

11d

About The Position

Heron Power Electronics is building cutting-edge power electronics products for the 21st-century grid, aiming to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the sustainable electrification of everything. The company's first goal is to build better converters to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads like datacenters to the grid. Heron Power's leadership team consists of seasoned veterans with extensive experience in power conversion products. The company believes great design is crucial for building great technology, encompassing physical machines, digital interfaces, tools, environments, documentation, and brand. Designers work directly with engineers, operators, customers, and leadership in a fast-moving, deeply technical environment to transform complex technology into clear, useful, thoughtful products and experiences. This is a broad design role with industrial design at its core, covering physical product design, product UX, visual communication, and brand. Designers may work on developing the form, architecture, and interfaces of new power electronics products, improving operator interaction, or creating graphics and documentation to clarify complex ideas. The role involves close collaboration with the Head of Design and leadership across various departments including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, manufacturing, software, and commercial. The position requires fluidity in problem definition, concept exploration, solution prototyping, production-ready design development, and bringing products to market. As a Staff-level designer, autonomy, ownership of ambiguous problems, establishing a strong point of view, rapid execution, and enhancing design quality and coherence are expected.

Requirements

Significant professional experience designing and shipping physical products, with a portfolio demonstrating exceptional industrial design thinking and craft, strong taste, breadth across disciplines, and the ability to carry ideas from early exploration through polished execution.
Strong industrial design fundamentals, including form development, proportion, product architecture, CMF, ergonomics, manufacturing processes, and design detailing.
Strong 3D skills and experience developing concepts through CAD, rendering, prototyping, and physical models.
Experience collaborating closely with engineering teams and working within real technical, manufacturing, cost, and schedule constraints.
Strong graphic and visual communication skills, including layout, composition, typography, information hierarchy, diagrams, and presentation design.
Ability to take complex technical information and make it understandable through design.
Experience thinking about products as complete experiences—not just objects—including physical interaction, interfaces, installation, service, communication, and environment.
Ability to independently frame ambiguous problems, develop a point of view, communicate design rationale, and drive work forward with limited direction.
Low ego, high curiosity, strong internal drive, and sincere enthusiasm for collaborating with people from disciplines very different from your own.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing industrial equipment, energy products, robotics, vehicles, electronics, or other technically complex physical products.
Experience with UX or interaction design for hardware, embedded interfaces, tools, dashboards, or technical systems.
Experience developing or evolving visual identities and applying brand systems across physical and digital touchpoints.
Experience with product graphics, labeling, wayfinding, environmental graphics, or tradeshow/exhibition design.
Experience working in a startup or other environment where designers need to do it all, big and small, and move comfortably between strategy and hands-on execution.
An interest in electricity, energy systems, manufacturing, and the physical infrastructure that makes modern life possible.

Responsibilities

Drive industrial design efforts across Heron's power electronics products, from early architecture and concept development through detailed design and production.
Work directly with mechanical, electrical, thermal, manufacturing, and systems engineers to understand technical constraints and turn them into thoughtful product solutions.
Explore product architecture, proportion, form, materials, finishes, interfaces, serviceability, manufacturing processes, and details.
Build quickly and think through making—using sketches, CAD, physical prototypes, renderings, mockups, animations, and whatever tools best address the question at hand.
Help define how people physically interact with Heron products, including installation, operation, service, access, controls, labeling, status communication, and safety.
Contribute to digital product UX where physical and digital experiences intersect, working with software teams to make complex systems understandable and intuitive.
Develop clear visual communication for complex technical ideas through diagrams, information graphics, presentations, product graphics, documentation, and other storytelling tools.
Extend and evolve Heron's visual identity across products, spaces, digital experiences, events, and communications.
Establish design systems, principles, and patterns that create consistency across an expanding family of Heron products and touchpoints.
Advocate for the user while balancing engineering performance, manufacturing, cost, reliability, safety, serviceability, and business requirements.
Raise the design bar across the company through strong craft, thoughtful critique, clear communication, and a willingness to get into the details and go the extra mile.