- Start date: Ideally September 2026, with some flexibility depending on your availability
- Application deadline: Open
- Location: Montreal Studio, Canada (must have the right to work in Canada)
- Experience: 7+ professional years
- To apply: Send your portfolio, CV, and a short note about why you’d be a great fit to career@punctuatedesign.com
- Subject line: Senior industrial designer 2026
Punctuate is seeking a Senior Industrial Designer to help shape products that matter, to the people who use them and to the world they'll live in. This is a creative and senior role for a designer who pairs real conceptual craft with executional rigor, and who can carry a mandate from strategy through to production. You'll work with startups building from scratch and established SMEs taking their next product further, on work that has real impact on people or on the planet. You'll lead by example, drive projects forward, mentoring others and act as both a design and thought partner in our highly creative and ambitious studio. This hybrid role is based in MOntreal, Canada (3 days per week onsite).
What you'll do
- Lead by example. Drive projects from research to launch, delivering flows, prototypes, and high-fidelity assets that set the standard.
- Frame the real problem. Take a vague brief and get back to what actually matters with the client, before drawing anything.
- Own the mandate end to end. From strategy and concept through to production handoff, you stay the owner of the direction.
- Defend a direction. You're a voice of the studio with your clients: you present, you argue your case and you say what needs to be said even when it's uncomfortable.
- Design for manufacturing. Work hand in hand with our mechanical engineering team on feasibility, materials, and DFM, to protect the direction you've set.
- Craft with an eye for detail. Bring real creative sensibility and precision to every stage, balanced by a user-centered approach.
- Elevate the team. Mentor the more junior designers and raise the level of what comes out of the studio.
What we're looking for
- 7+ years in industrial design, with products that actually reached production. We want to see what came out of the factory, not just what looked good in a render.
- Real creative craft and an eye for detail, balanced by a user-centered approach.
- The ability to frame a mandate upstream: research, problem definition, concept direction.
- Bilingual French/English. Our clients are in Quebec, English Canada, the US, and France, and you need to lead a strategic meeting in either language.
- Confidence presenting to executives and clients, with good storytelling and communication skills.
- Proficiency with modern design tools: 3D (Rhino, Fusion 360, SolidWorks, Keyshot, Blender) and 2D (Illustrator, Photoshop), with manufacturing knowledge deep enough to design around real processes.
- Real hands-on practice with AI tools, and the judgment to know where they save time and where they flatten the result.
- Some experience mentoring or leading others.
- Eligible to work in Canada.
- Bonus: Experience working in an agency or consulting environment
What matters most: the ability to get back to the real problem. Most mandates arrive with a solution already written into the brief. Our work starts by taking that apart.
The studio
Punctuate Design is a physical product development studio based in Montreal, working from strategy through manufacturing. We're partners to our clients, not executors: we're invested in the product's commercial success, not just its delivery. Our zone of excellence is the emotional link between a product and its end user, held in the tension between radical creativity and executional rigor.
We're a small team where your name stays attached to what you make, and where you see your products reach the market.
What we offer
- A permanent role with real autonomy and a growth path as we scale
- A chance to work on meaningful products that improve people’s lives
- A collaborative, ego-free studio that values people as much as projects
- Access to a multidisciplinary team (ID, strategy, engineering, prototyping)
- Creative freedom and real ownership of your work
- Hybrid schedule in our Montreal studio (3 days per week onsite)
- 20 vacation days per year, plus a studio closure from December 25 to January 1 inclusive
Apply
Send your portfolio and a few lines about a product you're proud of, explaining the design decision that made the difference. No formal cover letter. Applications without a portfolio will not be considered.
We answer every application. Interviews on a rolling basis.
career@punctuatedesign.com — subject: "Senior Industrial Designer"
