Senior Designer
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 Designer 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 Designer would be expected to both produce their own work and to direct the work of others.
Minimum Qualifications
- Considerable experience designing interactions for a broad range of product types
- Capable of highly independent work, originating briefs, and proactively building coalitions across Apple
- A wide range of prototyping skills ranging from scrappy to polished
- Technical fluency in hardware, software, or both, and the ability to independently build work
- 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
- Minimum 2 years working at Apple in Cupertino
- Willingness to travel to Cupertino 3+ times per year, or as required
- Willingness to meet on Cupertino hours, as required
- Portfolio or link to portfolio required to apply
Preferred Qualifications
- Deep technical expertise in software, AI/ML, or audio
- Significant expertise designing for AI/ML interactions
- Experience organizing, directing, and motivating project teams
- A deep and broad network within Apple
- Experience working with Apple design teams