Freelance Industrial Designer — Competitive Team Building Play Kit (Towers & Bridges)

Part-Time / Fractional (Ongoing) — approximately 15–25 hours per week

Start: July 1, 2026

About Hatch Duo

Hatch Duo is an award-winning industrial design and engineering consultancy in San Jose. We design and engineer hardware for the companies shaping their categories across consumer electronics, robotics, medtech, wearables, beauty tech, sports tech, and gaming.
We are an award-winning tight-knit, fast, and senior by design: a nimble studio that ships real products and makes outsized impact for the brands we work with. Founded and led by Jonathan Thai, we partner with ambitious founders and Fortune 500 teams alike to catalyze new product categories and bring them to market.

Who We Are Looking For

This is a fractional role: our project pipeline is growing. We are bringing on an Indusrial Design Project Manager on a part-time, fractional basis specifically to manage that overflow, so every project keeps its rigor and pace even when the studio is at full tilt.

This role is built for someone who has experience in design/engineering management — led projects, coordinated teams, owned timelines and budgets in pieces — and is ready to step fully into project and program management as their craft. You bring real grounding in industrial design and hardware development. We bring the live projects, the founder mentorship, and the ownership to grow you into a project manager who runs the studio's most demanding work.
You will step into a busy studio and help our hardest projects run better — on time, on budget, and on scope, without ever flattening the creative work that makes them worth doing.
You already know how hardware gets made. You have sat in design reviews and engineering builds. You know what DFMA, EVT, DVT, and PVT actually require, not just what the acronyms stand for. You can hold a designer's intent and an engineer's constraint in the same hand while a deadline moves.
You are someone who:
- is organized by instinct — you see dependencies and risks before they become problems
- can run timelines and budgets without becoming the person nobody wants to update
- translates fluently between industrial designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, and clients
- protects scope and creative quality in the same breath
- has a bias for action — you make the priority call when a timeline compresses
- brings calm and structure to a fast, high-pressure studio, and is energized by it, not drained by it
- has low ego, high standards, and real ambition to build a program management career
- wants their fingerprints on shipped products across wildly different categories
You will work directly with Hatch Duo's partners, on how projects run and how the studio operates. Local candidates prioritized .
What You'll Do
- Build and own project roadmaps, schedules, and milestones — mapping dependencies across design and engineering so nothing slips silently
- Manage timelines, budgets, and scope across multiple concurrent client engagements
- Manage personnel, processes, as it relates to product development
- Forecast resourcing and studio capacity — know what each project needs before it needs it, and keep time-tracking systems current
- Drive cross-functional execution between industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering/firmware, and the founding team
- Identify risks, blockers, and dependencies early — and clear them
- Facilitate tradeoff decisions between design intent, engineering constraints, and client requirements
- Scope and document deliverables, manage client expectations, and secure clear client sign-off before work begins
- Run design reviews, build schedules, and client check-ins, and turn them into clear, tracked next steps
- Communicate status, priorities, and risk to the team, the founder, and clients — clearly and without spin
- Track prototyping and engineering milestones from concept through DFMA, EVT, DVT, and PVT
- Grow your program management craft with direct, hands-on mentorship from the founder
- Work on-site with the team in our San Jose studio
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in industrial design or equivalent.
- Direct experience in industrial design and/or hardware product development — you understand the design process from the inside(consultancy experience preferred)
- Ability to guide designers, extended team members, and stakeholders through the end-to-end industrial design process.
- Exceptional verbal, visual, and written communication skills for a wide range of audiences.
- Ability to facilitate solutions to complex problems with engineering, design, and supplier teams.
- Ability to lead a team on large number of projects while ensuring design and business goals are met.
- Demonstrate qualifications with a portfolio of leadership and hands-on design across a wide range of high-volume consumer products.
- 3–6 years of lead project or program management experience — formal, or hands-on within an industrial design or hardware team — and a clear ambition to make program management your career
- A track record of owning timelines, budgets, or client scope on real, shipped projects
- Working knowledge of engineering and prototyping processes, including DFMA, EVT, DVT, and PVT
- Strong organizational skills and the people skills to move cross-functional teams without direct authority
- Clear written communication — you can turn a messy project into a scope document, a schedule, and a status update people actually read
- Comfort building and maintaining schedules, and the drive to get fluent fast with project management tools (Asana, Jira, Smartsheet, Linear, or similar)
- Branding or brand-development experience
- A bias for action and steadiness under pressure — comfortable making priority calls when timelines compress
- Must live within commuting distance of our San Jose studio and work on-site (no remote or hybrid)
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior experience working as an industrial designer
- A strong eye for design and the ability to speak credibly about craft
- Any formal project management exposure or training (Agile/Scrum, PMP/CAPM, or similar) — or the drive to pursue it
- Experience coordinating with engineering teams and external vendors or contract manufacturers
- Familiarity with AI tools in a design or production workflow
- Fluency with Slack and modern collaboration tools
- Design consultancy or agency experience
Why Join Hatch Duo
Most project management jobs put you between the work and the people doing it. This one puts you inside it.
- A genuine career step-up. If you have dabbled in management and want to do it for real, this is the role that gets you there — running live client programs with founder mentorship, not waiting years for permission.
- Work directly with the founder. You will partner with Jonathan Thai on how projects run and how the studio operates — no layers, no handoffs.
- Real ownership from day one. You run your projects. You are not shadowing someone else's plan or waiting years to earn scope.
- Category variety, not a silo. In a single month you might touch robotics, a wearable, a medtech device, and a gaming product. Bigger firms cannot offer that range.
- Ship real products. Hatch Duo's work goes to market. Your projects become things people actually use — not decks that die in review.
- Your work is visible. On a small, senior team, what you do is seen, attributed, and shapes how the firm runs.
- A studio with momentum. This role exists because we have more good work than hands to run it. You are joining a studio that is busy and growing.
- A real path forward. This role is built to grow. For the right person, the fractional engagement is a track toward an expanded, full-time role as the studio scales.
If you want impact, ownership, and a real step up in your career — and you do your best work when the pace is real — you will thrive here.

Company Description
Founded in 2018 by Jonathan Thai, Hatch is a design consultancy aimed at delivering holistic product experiences for our clients. Being a small and nimble design team, we are able to quickly deliver a huge impact to the brands we work with across many different industry sectors, including consumer electronics, medical, lifestyle, industrial, and more. We work with early to later-stage startups, as well as Fortune 500 companies. HD's mission is to innovate and influence future human experiences through design. HD collaborates with the world's most innovative companies to catalyze new product categories and bring them to market.