Senior Industrial Designer

Senior Industrial Designer

Ashland, Oregon | Onsite 4 days a week, remote one | Travel less than 10%

The Mission

A great product idea is only the beginning. The harder work is turning that idea into a play experience that feels fresh, works beautifully, survives the realities of manufacturing, and still looks like the concept everyone believed in at the start.

As a Senior Industrial Designer at Blue Marble, you'll own complex product design work from early concept through production. You'll shape the creative direction of individual products, make strong tradeoffs across play value, aesthetics, cost, safety, and manufacturability, and help raise the quality of the design work around you through thoughtful critique and mentorship.

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You'll influence product strategy and execution through the strength of your work and judgment rather than through formal people management.

Can you turn a compelling idea into a production-ready product without designing the magic out of it? If so, we'd like to see how you think.

What You'll Do

• Own complex product design. Lead industrial design for toys, play experiences, and consumer products from exploration through production, making clear design decisions as constraints and information evolve.
• Create ideas worth building. Develop original concepts that balance play value, visual appeal, usability, differentiation, cost, safety, and commercial reality.
• Turn concepts into production intent. Create sketches, renderings, production-ready CAD, prototypes, CMF direction, specifications, and presentation materials that communicate exactly what the product should become.
• Protect the idea through development. Evaluate prototypes, engineering samples, and factory samples; identify what is not working; and partner with Engineering and manufacturing teams to solve issues without losing the intended consumer experience.
• Design for the real world. Apply strong knowledge of materials, plastics, tooling, manufacturing processes, tolerances, assembly, and DFM to make products feasible, durable, and efficient to produce.
• Use insight, not trend-chasing. Translate consumer observations, play testing, competitive research, emerging technologies, and material exploration into better product decisions and new opportunities.
• Raise the design bar around you. Give useful critique, mentor fellow designers, lead design reviews and ideation sessions, and help strengthen design standards without needing formal authority.
• Build alignment across the system. Partner with Product Development, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Licensing, Compliance, legal counsel, and overseas manufacturing partners; present design rationale clearly to internal and external stakeholders.

What You Bring

• You combine creative range with practical judgment. You can generate many ideas, recognize which ones deserve to move forward, and keep improving the work when feedback, cost, safety, or manufacturing realities force a change.
• You are comfortable defending a design decision without becoming attached to being right. You seek useful critique, give it respectfully, and know when a product needs another round rather than another explanation.
• You notice details, but you can also see the whole product experience. You communicate visually and verbally, take ownership of follow-through, and make the people around you better through the quality of your thinking and collaboration.

What It Takes

• A portfolio that demonstrates strong industrial design fundamentals, original thinking, and multiple products or comparable manufactured consumer experiences carried from concept into production.
• Advanced capability in sketching, ideation, visualization, physical prototyping, and production-ready 3D CAD; SolidWorks or comparable professional CAD experience is appropriate.
• Strong working knowledge of materials, plastics, tooling, manufacturing processes, DFM, and the tradeoffs required to bring consumer products to market.
• Experience evaluating prototypes and production samples, diagnosing design issues, and working cross-functionally to resolve them.
• The ability to present design intent and recommendations clearly to senior stakeholders, partners, and collaborators with different technical backgrounds.
• Evidence that you can lead through craft, judgment, critique, and influence while remaining a hands-on designer.

What Sets You Apart

Experience with toys, children's products, licensed products, educational products, or other high-volume consumer goods can shorten the learning curve. So can direct collaboration with overseas manufacturers, rapid prototyping and 3D printing, product safety/compliance work, patent-support materials, and tools such as SolidWorks, KeyShot, Adobe Creative Suite, Vizcom, Rhino, Alias, ZBrush, Creo, or comparable platforms. We care more about the quality of your work and judgment than whether your tool list matches ours exactly.

How We'll Measure Success

• Your products are distinctive, engaging, manufacturable, and commercially grounded - not just attractive concepts.
• Design intent survives the path from concept to tooling and production because problems are surfaced early and resolved thoughtfully.
• Cross-functional partners understand the design rationale, key tradeoffs, and decisions needed to keep work moving.
• You handle increasingly complex products and ambiguous design problems with strong independent judgment and dependable follow-through.
• Your critique and mentorship make other designers' work better without creating dependency or unnecessary hierarchy.
• You improve the way Blue Marble designs - through stronger standards, better methods, sharper questions, and practical adoption of new tools where they genuinely add value.

Is Blue Marble Right for You?

We're intentionally building a culture of people who lead by example, challenge one another respectfully, take ownership of their work, and want to continue learning and improving.

Blue Marble may be exactly the place you're looking for if...

• You take ownership of your words, actions, and work product.

• You value honest, hard conversations and long-term progress over short-term comfort.

• You enjoy solving meaningful problems and seek purposeful work.

• You see feedback as an opportunity to improve and grow.

• You naturally look for ways to make things better and help others succeed.

• You ask questions when something isn't clear.

• You believe character matters as much as competence.

• You proactively bring solutions to problems.

On the other hand, you probably won't enjoy working here if...

• You spend more time making excuses or pointing fingers than solving problems.

• You consistently avoid difficult conversations.

• You believe your responsibility ends with your job description.

• You need someone to constantly tell you what to do.

• You become defensive when receiving constructive feedback.

• You believe being right is more important than finding the best solution.

• You consistently wait for instructions rather than taking appropriate initiative.

• You have difficulty acknowledging mistakes and learning from them.

• You're primarily looking for a paycheck rather than an opportunity to meaningfully contribute.

We're not looking for perfect people.

We're looking for capable people who want to keep getting better and who bring their best to the people and work around them.

If this sounds like you, let's make great things together.

This description is not exhaustive; responsibilities may evolve as Blue Marble grows.

Blue Marble is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable law and provide reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process.