Founding Designer

About the role

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.

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

• 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

• Move Fast, Move Smart: act quickly, with good judgment.
• Ownership: see things through, from idea to result.
• Disagree, Then Commit: talk it out openly, then row in the same direction.
• Intellectual Honesty: be candid, stay curious, follow the evidence.
• 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.