Bag this Apple job and Jony Ive will be your boss

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Apple job
Apple's Industrial Design team at the Apple Watch unveiling.
Photo: Leander Kahney / Cult of Mac

If you have design chops and believe your ideas belong in the same room as Jony Ive, Apple has an opening on the team that creates some of the world’s most important tech.

Apple is currently accepting applications for an industrial designer to join the Industrial Design Group in Cupertino. This is a tight-knit group of around 20 designers headed by the legendary Ive that are seen as the principal inventors of Apple’s iconic devices.

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The role of an industrial designer at Apple is to “imagine objects that don’t exist and to guide the process that brings them to life,” former Apple designer Christopher Stringer told Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney, the author of a book on Ive.

The Apple listing appears on the design site Dezeen, which includes a section for top companies to advertise job openings. According to the post, it first appeared July 17 with a Sept. 10 deadline.

The job search site Indeed published what appears to be the same listing two weeks ago. A search on the Apple website “Job Opportunities” page lists an add from March of the same wording with no deadline.

According to the ad, the Industrial Design Group is “looking for highly motivated, determined problem-solvers with a rigorous attention to detail. We are interested in seeing work at all levels.”

Here are some of the must-haves Apple lists in its add:

  • Candidates should possess a portfolio that shows an understanding of how a product can be produced.
  • A passion for materials and material exploration and a healthy obsession with how things are made and how they work.
  • radical creativity and a deep appreciation for aesthetics.
  • basic 3D skills.

To get a deeper sense for what it is like to work with the group, Kahney’s book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products reveals a dynamic range of details about the otherwise cloistered department within Apple.

In 2015, Kahney wrote a feature for Cult of Mac that describes the feel of the offices, the kind of music that permeates the environment (Ive loves techno) and details the process of how an idea goes from a sketch to production.

The majority of Apple employees never set foot in the Design Group Office, Kahney wrote. The team assumes a large part of the burden of Apple’s legendary secrecy. Team members spend long hours together and likely will never see individual credit for their ideas.

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