Product Designer | Manufacturing and Defense

Job description

WHAT WE DO Gecko Robotics is helping the world’s most important organizations ensure the availability, reliability, and sustainability of critical infrastructure. Gecko's complete and connected solutions combine wall-climbing robots, industry-leading sensors, and an AI-powered data platform to provide customers with a unique window into the current and future health of their physical assets. This enables real-time decision making to increase the efficiency and safety of operations, promote mission readiness, and protect the environment and civilization from the effects of infrastructure failure. Role at a Glance We are seeking a Product Designer to join our Manufacturing team and design user experiences at the unique intersection of customers, software, factory floors, and cutting-edge physical AI. This is a high-impact, non-traditional role where you will translate firsthand customer insights into strategic product direction, building systems that directly strengthen America’s industrial base. Your work will span human-operated and autonomous robotic Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) data collection systems, in addition to the collaborative software platforms where customers, suppliers, engineers, and analysts make mission-critical decisions. By bridging the gap between complex material health data and intuitive workflows, you will create tools that improve process, increase throughput, and ensure the quality of safety-critical, high-value components. As a key member of the Manufacturing team, you will work day-to-day with strategists, engineers, field operators, and customers to define not just how a feature looks, but what is worth building and why it matters. You will frequently travel to customer sites, anchoring our product in the real-world environment of the factory floor and collaborating directly with users who may be adopting this category of technology for the very first time. This role requires a highly autonomous, curious, and user-centered designer who thrives in ambiguous environments and takes proactive ownership of a project. This role supports U.S. Navy manufacturing programs. Its essential functions require regular access to export-controlled technical data, U.S. Government information systems, and customer facilities subject to U.S.-person access requirements. To satisfy the U.S. Government contractual and customer-access requirements applicable to this role, the selected candidate must qualify as a “U.S. person," that is, a U.S. citizen or national, lawful permanent resident, or other protected individual, including a refugee or asylee, as defined by 8 U.S.C. § 1324b(a)(3). This requirement applies only to roles with these access needs and is not a general condition of employment at Gecko Robotics or its affiliates. What you will do - Work directly with users in customer organizations, often at their plant, forge, or shop. - Collaborate with robotics teams, product strategists, and engineers to understand workflows, constraints, failure modes, and opportunities. - Develop firsthand understanding of customer domains, mental models, workflows, and operational realities. - Use sketches, prototypes, diagrams, research, code, or whatever artifact aligns the team and drives decisions. - Shape how design works inside Gecko: independent, collaborative, customer-grounded, technically fluent, and oriented toward progress. - Turn field learning and customer feedback into product concepts that scale beyond a single user or customer. - Ship improvements to real users and iterate based on what happens in the field. - Raise the bar for product clarity, user empathy, and execution quality. About You - Experience owning complex, end-to-end digital product spaces. - Deeply curious about users, technology, systems, and how work happens outside the software. - Independent enough to push your own work forward and collaborative enough to push the team's work forward. - Ability to translate direct customer conversations into scalable product thinking. - Understands complex technologies and can articulate credible product solutions. - Energized by the blurring lines between design, product strategy, engineering, and customer discovery. - Comfortable working within technical environments, with the ability to prototype or contribute directly to code when it is the fastest path to product clarity. - Experience in design for industrial, robotics, data-heavy, enterprise, or other complex technical domains. WHO WE ARE At Gecko, our people are our greatest investment. In addition to competitive compensation packages, we offer company equity, 401(k) matching, gender-neutral parental leave, full medical, dental, and vision insurance, mental health, ongoing professional development, family planning assistance, and flexible paid time off. Gecko values collaboration, innovation, and partnership, and we believe we do our best work when we're together in person. We’re an office-first culture but understand that sometimes you may need to work from home. Many people are in the office five days a week, others need a bit more flexibility. Ultimately, we care about the outcomes we achieve - and creating a culture of autonomy and trust that enables that impact. Gecko is committed to creating a culture of inclusion and belonging, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We believe it is our collective responsibility to uphold these values and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to join us in our mission to protect today’s infrastructure and give form to tomorrow’s. All qualified applicants will be treated with respect and receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, uniform service, veteran status, age, or any other protected characteristic per federal, state, or local law. If you are passionate about what you do and want to use your talents to support our critical mission, we’d love to hear from you.