Founding Designer

About Overlay

Overlay is building the world's first intelligent makeup robot—reimagining beauty application through robotics, perception, and design. As a venture-backed, pre-launch startup, we're defining a new category of personal robotics at the intersection of self-expression and engineering. Our system operates directly on the human face, requiring an unprecedented level of precision, safety, and real-world robustness.

We've raised significant funding and we're a small, technical team building in person in Oakland. We're making something real that doesn't exist yet — and we're looking for a designer to create a brand that resonates deeply with customers.

The Role

You'll be our first in-house designer, working alongside our external industrial design firm. One week you're refining the identity system, the next you're designing app screens with product, the next you're making something for social that people actually want to share.

This is a senior role, but it's a builder's role too — you make the work, not just direct it. Early on you'll do a lot yourself, working closely with the founder and our founding marketer, with support from contractors where it helps. As we grow, you'll set the creative bar for everyone who joins after you.

Our customer has high standards and great taste. Design that reaches her has to feel premium, native, and a little magic — across a robot, an app, and a feed.

What makes this role exciting

• You define the brand in a new category with no template to inherit. (The robot's industrial design direction is locked, with a top agency executing — so you're building the brand world around a product that already has a strong beautiful form.)
• Brand, social, and product live together here. You carry one point of view across all of it, without silos or handoffs.
• The product is genuinely fun to design for. Hardware, app, and content are one canvas.
• You'll work closely with the founder and see your work reach customers quickly.

What You'll Do

• Own Overlay's visual identity — logo system, typography, color, motion, art direction — and carry it across everything we make.
• Design the product experience alongside engineering: app UI in Figma, from flows to polished shipped screens.
• Create social and campaign creative natively for each platform, in partnership with our marketing lead.
• Partner with our industrial design agency to keep the brand, product, and hardware feeling like one object of desire.
• Build the design infrastructure (systems, templates, AI-assisted pipelines) that lets a small team produce like a big one.
• Use AI across your workflow — generation, prototyping, production — and keep raising the bar on what's possible with it.

What We're Looking For

You don't need to check every box, if most of this sounds mostly like you, please apply.

• 5+ years across brand and digital design, with shipped work in: brand identity, social/campaign creative, and product UI.
• An AI-native workflow — tools like Midjourney, Figma AI, Runway, or Claude Code are part of how you work daily, and you have a point of view on them.
• A portfolio with range: strong systems thinking and work with personality.
• A feel for a premium, design-minded customer — taste that shows up in the details.
• Ease with ambiguity, change, and the occasional blank page — you scope your own work and ship without a creative director.

Bonus Points

• Experience collaborating with industrial design or packaging partners — you know how to art-direct across physical and digital.
• You've built a brand or design system from scratch at an early-stage company.
• You can prototype in code, or use AI to get there.
• 3D modeling experience.
• A real love of makeup, skincare, beauty, and its subcultures.

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary & generous early-stage equity
• Best-in-class medical, dental & vision insurance
• 401(k) matching program
• Flexible Time Off with 10 paid holidays
• Commuter benefits
• Office in downtown Oakland near 19th Street BART station

The Team

• Small, fast-moving team with high ownership and low process
• Strong bias toward shipping, learning, and iterating quickly
• In-person collaboration in our Oakland office

Culture & Values

1. Move Fast, Move Smart: act quickly, with good judgment.
2. Ownership: see things through, from idea to result.
3. Disagree, Then Commit: talk it out openly, then row in the same direction.
4. Intellectual Honesty: be candid, stay curious, follow the evidence.
5. Show, Don't Tell: real, working results over talk.

Compensation: The annual salary range for this position is $155K - $200K annually based on level in addition to equity & benefits.

Overlay is an equal opportunity employer and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds.