Job Description

About Skillz

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition.

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $68 billion in 2019 to $150 billion in 2025.

As the first publicly-traded mobile esports platform, Skillz has pioneered the future of the gaming industry. The Skillz platform helps developers build multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual esports tournaments for millions of mobile players worldwide, and distributes millions in prizes each month.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50, one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

What We’re Looking For

Our Research and Development department sets the vision for the future of the Skillz player experience in new arenas and the Hardware team is the latest addition. Skillz is a mobile social gaming platform where players compete for real prizes. We build a player experience that is visually rich with tournaments, chat, leaderboards, payments and customer support. In this role, you and the Hardware team will be building the physical representation of the Skillz brand by bringing new types of gameplay to millions of players through the development of a variety of hardware initiatives.

As a Senior Industrial Designer on the newly formed and quickly growing Hardware team you will be working on a variety of projects from gaming controllers to AR/VR devices as we develop and explore new opportunities in the gaming space - flexibility and creativity is key in this role. The ideal candidate will have a background in consumer electronics and understands the user needs, ergonomics, form proportion, color, materials, and manufacturing processes that transform concepts into functional, elegant, and manufacturable products.

What You’ll Do

• Redefine the future of gaming through the ideation and designing of products ranging from gaming controllers to AR/VR applications
• Create the ID vision and strategy, and generate support for it’s implementation across all hardware products
• Work with product management and engineering groups early in the development cycle to provide user-centered insight and generate conceptual designs
• Rapidly prototype, validate, and iterate designs
• Partner with design and marketing teams to help define a cohesive branding strategy within and across product families
• Work with manufacturing partners to bring successful concepts through production to market (some international travel may eventually be required)
  

Your Skillz

• Has a clear vision for the future of hardware based user experiences in mobile gaming
• Strong portfolio representing a contemporary design style that proves not only solid design processes but also showcases forward thinking designs
• Well-versed in user-centric design methodologies
• Excels at collaborating with and influencing product management and engineering counterparts
• Experience defining materials, optimizing designs for manufacturing, colors and part finishes, evaluating samples, and designing packaging solutions for retail/direct to consumer products
• Fluent in the Adobe Creative Suite and 3D such as Rhino, Alias, SolidWorks, Fusion 360, ProE, and KeyShot
• Relevant experience in gaming, consumer electronics, or robotics is a plus
• 5+ years of relevant experience in Industrial Design or Mechanical Product Design Engineering