Head of Industrial Design

Vast is seeking a Head of Industrial Design, reporting to the Director of Structures and Mechanisms, 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 unique opportunity to define the culture and operation of the industrial design team at Vast. You will create a design language and work in collaboration with our human factors 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 design of harsh environment habitats, aerospace or terrestrial 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 mechanical engineers to ensure a unified style while preserving technical requirements and schedule.
• Gather stakeholders feedback early in the design process and refine style guides 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 our Human Factors team to address NASA crew requirements.
• Evaluate hardware 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 also staying as close to the design vision as possible.

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.
• Experience creating vehicle interiors influenced by the unique challenges of living and working in extreme environments. 
• 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.

Additional Requirements:

• Must be willing to travel as required to meet with domestic and international customers (< 15%)
• Must be willing to work extended hours and weekends when necessary to support milestones and mission related deadlines