Industrial Designer

Vast is seeking an Industrial Designer to found the Vast industrial design team. You will define the Vast style guide and help our engineers interpret it to achieve a unique look for the crewed Vast space stations. This will be an exempt role located in Long Beach.

As the founding leader of the team, you will have the opportunity to define the culture and operation of the industrial design team at Vast. You will be drawn to create beautiful, inviting spaces from highly functional constraints. You’ll create comfort, physically and psychologically, using space, light, airflow, materials and processes. You’ll be comfortable creating environments that are unprecedented, yet feel completely natural. You’ll be a creative problem solver, a collaborator and a maker. You can realize the beauty in the smallest technical detail without losing sight of the big ideas. You’re an Industrial Designer in the details and an architect in the space.

You will create a design language and work in collaboration with our human systems team, to influence the look, feel, and user experience of Vast’s on-orbit assets, the ground based systems, and user product interactions. The ideal candidate will have a track record of human-centered design, industrial design, or architecture applied to the development of harsh environment habitats, aerospace, or terrestrial and nautical vehicles.

Responsibilities: 

• Create a design language for the Vast space stations.
• Utilizing an iterative process, generate concepts for habitats and spacecraft interiors.
• Through rapid prototyping, virtualization, and mockup fabrication, you will allow a first-hand, immersive experience of the vehicle interiors and gain feedback from both design engineers and astronauts.
• Achieve increasing levels of fidelity with concept sketches, CAD models, scaled prototypes, Virtual Reality, and full-size mockup fabrication culminating with a functional crew simulator/trainer system.
• Negotiate the product aesthetics and function with both senior management and our engineers to ensure a unified style while preserving technical requirements and schedule.
• Gather stakeholder feedback early in the design process to provide a unique and enduring design language for the future Vast products and vehicles to draw from.
• Liaise with selected agencies and customers on station design, crew safety and accessibility related areas, and facilitate tight coordination between the internal and external teams.
• Define and tailor requirements for crewed vehicle industrial design.
• Work with engineers to address NASA crew requirements. and to improve the safety, comfort, and usability of existing designs.
• Work with suppliers to achieve the best possible product in terms of craftsmanship, cost, and engineering while delivering the design vision.

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design, Architecture or a related design discipline or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 10+ years of industrial design experience ideally with aerospace or terrestrial vehicles or extreme environment habitation.
• 10+ years of professional digital modeling experience with a 3D modeling platform (such as Autodesk, NX, Blender).

Preferred Skills & Experience:

• A keen sense of aesthetics with a portfolio to demonstrate your capabilities.
• Ability to creatively solve problems and bring multiple disciplines together while preserving an uncompromising design aesthetic. 
• Comfort making design and development decisions with incomplete data sets or evolving requirements.
• Strong sense of accountability and integrity with excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort working within and across teams of engineers and scientists.

Additional Requirements:

• Willingness to travel as required to meet with domestic and international customers (< 15%).
• Willingness to work evenings and/or weekends to support critical mission milestones.

Pay Range: 

• Industrial Designer IV: $160,000 - $200,000