Senior Design Prototyping Engineer

Summary

Interaction Architecture (IA) is a design and prototyping team within the larger Apple Design Team. We are a diverse team of designers, hardware engineers, software engineers, and makers who explore future experiences for Apple’s existing and speculative products. We apply technical expertise and product thinking to early-stage concepts, most often doing work that incorporates multiple modalities in both hardware and software.

Description

IA is looking for a Senior Design Prototyping Engineer with excellent interaction design sensibilities and strong technical and interpersonal skills. You will help us “learn by doing”, working rapidly and cross-functionally to understand and express key capabilities of future products and technologies by creating interactive prototypes to guide decision-making and build intuition across the company. The work balances craft and perspective - shaping direction in ambiguous spaces, connecting ideas across disciplines, and designing experiences that feel effortless and grounded. You will collaborate with peers in a design-led environment where critique is constructive and frequent, briefs are intentionally open-ended, and the end goal is the human experience rather than technical perfection. Your work will be instrumental in helping Apple to understand the promises and pitfalls of technologies that may not even exist yet, and will help guide the incubation of those technologies towards product. The ideal candidate builds alignment across teams with different priorities and personalities, is self-motivated and proactive, works both independently and collaboratively, and can effectively engage on ambiguous briefs as well as on specific, directed work. A Senior Design Engineer would be expected to both produce their own work and to direct the work of others.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience managing cross-functional teams
Significant technical depth in hardware or software prototyping
Experience working with and building coalitions from diverse teams across a large company

Minimum Qualifications

3+ years working at Apple in Cupertino in a design or prototyping role
Considerable experience prototyping interactions for a broad range of product types
Experience organizing, directing, and motivating project teams
A wide range of prototyping skills ranging from scrappy to polished
Technical fluency in hardware and software prototyping
Strong product sensibility and ability to advocate for the end user experience
A mentor to others and dedicated to raising the overall quality of design across the group
Cross-disciplinary, exploratory and collaborative, with an ego-less working style that brings colleagues and their contributions together
A clear communicator, able to deliver coherent stories and documentation that frames the work in the appropriate context
Able to connect people to ideas in a way that generates excitement
Adept at sharing work and rationale with senior leadership
Comfortable with ambiguity, open-ended exploration, and receiving design critique