Wearable Neurotechnology · Women's Brain Health · Human-Centred Design

Mellow Labs · Full-time · Location: Remote with travel to San Francisco

Why We Exist

Mental health is an epidemic that's getting worse day by day. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, suicide, and PTSD are at an all-time high. This needs to change. We humans were not made for this sort of life. We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, fast-food-laden, sleep-deprived, frenzied pace of modern life. We are being robbed by the same tech that was meant to add value to our lives. It's time for a change.

Our team at Mellow Labs is building the future of mental health by bridging the gaps between science and mental health. Our aim as an organization is to create systemic impact, especially in underrepresented populations. We are currently building for women's brain health, as it's an area with poor clinical and scientific validation.

1993 — the first-ever clinical trials were conducted on women. 1996 — the first-ever brain scans on women. Only 1% of all brain scans represent a woman's brain, and our team wants to change that by bringing neurotechnology to women to improve their mental health.

The Impact You'll Have

This isn't a gadget that helps people order food faster. The device you design will sit at the intersection of neuroscience and daily life — helping women understand and improve their brain health in a field where they've been overlooked for decades. Every curve you refine, every material you choose, every hour of comfortable wear you make possible directly shapes whether someone gets insight into their own mind that medicine has never offered them before.

You'll be the first industrial designer on a product with the potential to close a decades-old gap in brain science. A wearable only gathers data if women actually want to wear it — so the form you give this device determines what the largest effort yet to represent women's brains in neuroscience can achieve. The object you design is how millions of women could first experience neurotechnology. Few design roles let you draw a straight line from your sketches to systemic change in mental health. This one does.

The Team You'll Join

You'll work alongside a world-class mental health team — neuroscientists, clinicians, researchers, and engineers who have dedicated their careers to understanding the brain and closing the gender gap in brain health. This means your day-to-day includes conversations most designers never get to have: reviewing form studies with scientists who study the very signals your device captures, and prototyping alongside people who deeply understand the problem you're solving.

We're a small, mission-driven team, which means your voice carries. You won't be a ticket-taker — you'll help shape the product, the design practice, and the company itself.

About the Role

Medical devices save lives, but too many of them look and feel like machines built for hospitals, not for people. We believe the device a woman wears every day should be as considered as anything else she chooses to put on her body — beautiful, comfortable, and quietly confident. We are looking for an industrial designer to help us prove that clinical rigour and beauty belong in the same object.

You will lead the human-centred design of our wearable from early concept through production, working shoulder-to-shoulder with electrical, mechanical, and biomedical engineers. This is not a styling role. You will shape how the product works on the body — its form, fit, materials, and rituals of use — and you will help build a design practice where engineering constraints and aesthetic ambition sharpen each other rather than compete.

What You'll Do

• Own the industrial design of a wearable neurotechnology device end to end: research, concept development, form studies, CMF (colour, material, finish), prototyping, and design for manufacture.

• Establish and champion a human-centred design process — user research, ergonomic studies, wear trials, and usability evaluations with women across ages, hair types, and head shapes — and translate findings into design decisions the whole team can act on.

• Collaborate daily with electrical, mechanical, and biomedical engineers to resolve the hard trade-offs: sensor contact vs. comfort, battery size vs. weight, signal quality vs. wearability, biocompatibility vs. material expression.

• Design for the body: skin contact, long-wear comfort, attachment systems, sizing across diverse bodies, and the emotional experience of wearing neurotechnology in daily life — at home, at work, in public.

• Build and test physical prototypes rapidly — from foam and 3D prints to appearance models and functional units — and run structured evaluations with real users.

• Contribute to design inputs, usability engineering documentation (IEC 62366), and design history files as part of a regulated development process.

• Help define the product's visual and tactile language — packaging, accessories, and out-of-box experience included — so the entire system feels like one coherent, cared-for object.

• Elevate design literacy across the company; make the case for beauty as a clinical outcome, not a luxury — because a device women love to wear is a device that generates the science.

What You Bring

• A portfolio of shipped physical products that demonstrates both craft and rigour — ideally including a wearable, medical, or body-worn device that made it to production.

• Hands-on experience designing products with dense electromechanical internals, and fluency in the constraints of electrical, mechanical, and biomedical engineering — you can read a PCB outline, question a tolerance stack, and discuss biocompatible materials credibly.

• A genuine human-centred design practice: you have planned and run user research and ergonomic studies, and you can show how findings changed the product.

• Strong skills in 3D CAD (e.g., SolidWorks, Fusion 360, or Rhino), rendering, and rapid prototyping; comfort working at both sketch speed and production precision.

• Deep knowledge of materials, finishes, and manufacturing processes for small, high-precision devices — injection moulding, overmoulding, silicone, textiles, and adhesives.

• Exceptional taste and the ability to defend it with reasoning, not just conviction — and the humility to let evidence from users change your mind.

• Clear communication and a collaborative instinct: you make engineers better designers and let them make you a better engineer-of-form.

Nice to Have

• Experience in a regulated environment (ISO 13485, FDA design controls, IEC 62366 usability engineering).

• Familiarity with skin-safe materials, biocompatibility (ISO 10993), and long-wear adhesives.

• Experience with soft goods, textiles, or jewellery-adjacent products — anything that lives on the body.

• Experience designing for women's health, consumer health, or neurotech products.

• Degree in industrial design, or equivalent experience with a formal foundation in design methods.

How We Work

Design and engineering sit at one table here. Industrial designers are in the room when architecture decisions are made, and engineers are in the room during user research. We prototype early, test on real bodies often, and treat every constraint — regulatory, electrical, biological — as design material rather than an obstacle. The goal is a device women are proud to wear, built to a standard clinicians trust.

How to Apply

Send your portfolio and a short note about a product you designed for the body — what the hardest constraint was, and how you turned it into something beautiful — to hr@mellowlabs.ca