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Product Designer
Sunrise FuturesCET +/- 3
Apply Our Mission:
At Sunrise Robotics, we are dedicated to augmenting humanity through intelligent robotics. Our mission is to elevate the world of manufacturing by introducing intelligent, flexible robots that enhance human capabilities and existing machinery, ushering in the next era of production at higher quality, with less waste, and lower cost.
Our Vision:
We see a future where every element of manufacturing, from design to assembly, is optimised with intelligent automation. Our vision is to integrate flexible robotic solutions, based on generic hardware and advanced software/AI capabilities, into manufacturing, particularly in small and medium-sized enterprises, to make automation economically viable and accessible, for all sizes of manufacturers. We are not just building robots; we are creating the strategically crucial components for autonomous, intelligent agents of the future.
The Role:
Sunrise Robotics is hiring its first Product Designer. You’d work on Cell Experience (CX), the discipline of making a robotic cell legible, trusted, and integrated by the people working around it and alongside it.
This isn't purely a technical role, as a cell doesn't exist in isolation. It's introduced, explained, handed over, and evaluated by real people: operators on the floor, supervisors managing throughput, plant managers assessing ROI, and the field engineers who commission and maintain them. Design touches all of it: how a cell communicates its state, how a new operator builds confidence with it, how a plant manager understands its value. We're building automation as a service, and that means the experience extends well beyond the screen.
In the first six months, you'll build Sunrise's design language and bring it to life across every CX surface: from operator software interfaces to the physical signals a cell sends across a production floor. A year from now, that language will be coherent across the fleet and across the journey: a person should be able to walk up to any Sunrise cell, in any facility, and operate it safely and confidently without prior training. Your design is what gets us there.
This is a founding design role. You'll define the tools, standards, and quality of craft, working directly with robotics, AI, software, and mechanical teams to make complex, autonomous systems feel predictable and trustworthy in live environments.
What You’ll Do:
Own the design of Cell Experience across every interaction surface: operator software (operations, analytics, settings), physical interfaces (e-stop, lights, sound, feedback), and the service touch-points around them.
Design for the full journey: how a cell is introduced, onboarded, monitored, handed over, and understood: by operators, supervisors, plant managers, and field engineers.
Define the interaction models, system behaviours, and design principles that make autonomous systems feel safe and intuitive to people who didn't choose them and weren't trained on them.
Develop Sunrise's design language into a fleet-coherent system that scales across diverse manufacturing environments.
Design for real-world conditions: edge cases, failure modes, alert states, and recovery flows in noisy, high-stakes settings.
Prototype concepts across software and physical surfaces: UI flows, light system logic, display hierarchies, and feedback mechanisms.
Work directly with engineering disciplines to ensure designs translate faithfully into production-quality behaviour.
Validate designs with operators and other users in live settings, and iterate on what actually happens on the floor.
Set the standard for design quality, clarity, and craft as the design function grows.
What You’ll Need:
Experience carrying design across both product and service - you think about the full journey, not just the interface.
Strong foundation in UX, interaction design, and service design, with high visual quality and the ability to work across all dimensions.
Experience designing for high-stakes, complex systems where the people using them didn't commission them and can't always stop when something goes wrong. That might be manufacturing - or it might be healthcare, transport, logistics, financial services, or a comparable domain.
The ability to think in systems: across states, flows, behaviours, environments, and the humans moving through all of them.
Proficiency with Figma and the ability to move quickly from concept to testable prototype.
Clear, structured communication. You are able to articulate design rationale and drive decisions across engineering, product, and leadership.
Strong sense of ownership and the confidence to make decisions without existing processes to fall back on.
What Makes You Stand Out:
Experience designing for physical-digital products or environments: places where screen and space have to work together.
Fluency with multimodal interfaces: visual, auditory, haptic, or light-based feedback systems.
The ability to carry a design language across a product line or service over time - coherent, not rigid.
Strong narrative and communication design: making complex systems understandable to people who didn't build them.
A habit of building in the open: sharing work early, writing up decisions, helping others see the thinking.
Technical curiosity: front-end code, microcontrollers, or hardware tinkering that lets you test ideas in the physical world.
A clear point of view on what good human-machine interaction looks and feels like: with examples to back it up.
Why Us:
Most design work sits on one side of a boundary: digital or physical, product or service, screen or space. This role sits across all of them, and that's rare.
The design challenge here is substantial. You're making autonomous systems that move, that fail, that recover, that operate in environments where the stakes are real. They need to feel clear and trustworthy to the people who work with them every day.
Scope: From the logic of a status light to the journey a plant manager takes before they trust a cell on their floor, the full range is yours to design.
Craft that compounds: The design system you build here will run across a growing fleet in real production environments. You'll see your decisions at work in the world.
Direct access: You'll work with founders and the wider team on decisions that shape the company's direction.
A new discipline: We’re defining Cell Experience as a new discipline. You're setting what good design looks like for it.