Engineer / Product Designer

We’re looking for a talented designer, who also has a degree in engineering.

Inch is a clever, small and scrappy engineering and product development consultancy founded in 1990. We’re interested in more than just making things that work well and look good. We want to improve nutrition, expose children to great books, eliminate waste and consistently do some good. We work with clients that we respect, and we create products that we believe in.

We have developed a wide range of products, including a CD jewel box (Sony), wing de-icing systems (Boeing), high end audio speakers (Anthony Gallo Acoustics), dental syringes (Johnson & Johnson), museum lighting fixtures that use very little electricity (LSI), dispensers/packages for cosmetics (Revlon), and glass bathroom doors that turn opaque (Bar89).

Our designs have twice won an annual I.D. magazine gold award and received a 2009 Business Week IDEA award. Inch has been featured in: The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and at the London Design Museum.


What we’re looking for:

We’re looking for an experienced designer/engineer that has worked at a product design consultancy for 2 years or longer. We want problem solvers, who have a talent for invention, and are experienced at building working devices, models, or contraptions. You’ll need to have a lot of patience, and can handle starting over several times to develop a design that’s a little better than iteration number 3. You also have to like working hard – sometimes projects need to go very fast.

You need to be an artist and an engineer. Most of the products we make have to do much more than just work – they have to look elegant, or tough, or fun -- and always well designed.

We are looking for people that understand the physics of the problems they are solving, and have broken enough things to have good intuition on what’s going to go wrong on a design, and how to fix it. You need to have at least a Bachelor’s degree from a great engineering school, and be able to demonstrate sensitivity to the practicalities of making a product that people love to use. We want people that are experienced in developing, prototyping and moving a product into manufacturing with a thorough documentation package. If you’re talented, and have experience working as part of a development team on technical products with appearance requirements, we’d like to meet.

Specific Skills

You need to be very good at SolidWorks and eager to become great. You should have experience designing complex parts for injection molding. Rhino, Illustrator, and Photoshop skills are useful. You will also need to be good at sketching by hand. These don’t have to be beautiful sketches, just quick and clear so that everyone can understand and react to your ideas.

You’ve got to have a vision and be able to respectfully disagree when you see things differently than everyone else. But you also need to be able to recognize when your concept isn’t the one that we’re moving forward with and be able to get (nearly) 100 percent behind the new direction. You have to be a great teammate, someone who helps everyone get stronger, and more communicative.

If you’re not a perfect match, but you’ve got 2 or more years of fulltime design work experience, and you’re certain you would become indispensable in a few months, send an email and convince us.

How to Apply

Apply via email to: infoinch-inc.com

*Candidates who are not US citizens or permanent residents need to have authorization to work in the US in order to apply.

Submission Details

Send images, drawings and anecdotes to show us that you have the talents, personality and experience that we’ve described. Send email with PDF attachments only, or a link to a website. Do not mail anything to us, and please don’t call.