Senior Industrial Designer, Hardware UX

Urban Company

Native by Urban Company

Bengaluru: 4–7 years

We’re hiring a senior industrial designer; someone who owns whole products, and whose specialism is hardware UX: how a device feels, responds, and communicates when a person uses it.

About Native

Native is the product company inside Urban Company, India’s leading online home-services platform, which also runs in the UAE, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. Last year, about 9.3 million households booked through it, and its service professionals worked on more than five million appliances.

While other appliance brands learn how people use their products through surveys and call-centre logs, we learn from the technician who was in a customer’s kitchen this morning and saw the button nobody presses, or the workaround someone invented because the product didn’t tell them what it was doing. Here, you can go and watch real use in real homes.

Native launched in October 2023 with a purifier that needs no service for two years. The M3 line of RO water purifiers runs on one set of filters for three years. We also make smart locks, and there’s more in the pipeline. What gets designed here ends up in lakhs of homes.

Most of Native product’s character comes from two things: a form that stays simple yet unique enough to stand out in the crowd, and interactions that feel a generation ahead. Our purifier tells you it’s working without a screen full of icons. A lock that opens before you’ve finished reaching for it. Getting there is hardware UX work, done with prototypes, measurements, and real hands rather than just renders. The team is small, and an interaction you design, in a device you design, ends up in lakhs of homes, used several times a day.

The role

You’ll own the industrial design of whole products, form included, and you’ll own hardware UX across everything we make.

The hardware UX work:

Inputs. Buttons, touch surfaces, dials, levers, and faucets. You’ll set travel, force, click, and feedback in numbers, and prototype until they feel right.
Feedback and light. How a device says “done”, “wait”, “something’s wrong”, and “change me” through light, sound, and motion.
The moments of delight. The first install, the daily glass of water, the filter change, the unlock at the door at night with full hands. You’ll find where these break down, often in ways customers never report, and redesign them.
Working with engineering. Mechanisms with design engineering, LEDs and sensors with electronics, behaviour with firmware.
You’ll also own base CMF on your products: material, colour, finish choices that support the form and the interaction, specified so a vendor can repeat them.
You’ll take positions and defend them with a prototype and a number. You’ll chase your parts through tooling and first samples until they are production-ready. And you’ll set the hardware UX bar for the rest of the team, which means teaching it.

You have

4-7 years of industrial design experience, with at least two products taken from concept to mass production.
Appliance or automotive experience (interiors or two-wheelers count), with physical controls and feedback designed
Hands-on hardware UX depth: e.g. you’ve specified button travel and force, designed a light or sound language, prototyped interactions physically, and run tests with real users
A strong, simple sense of form
Enough engineering fluency to sit with mechanisms, electronics and tooling and hold your ground
Working CMF knowledge for moulded and finished parts
A portfolio that shows interactions, prototypes and the failures behind them, not just renders
Ownership and hunger to learn, shown in what you’ve done

How we’ll assess you

A portfolio conversation about two projects in depth. Then we’ll give you a take-home assignment based on the strengths we identify in the portfolio conversation.