Product Architect

Come Reinvent the Building

Most architects spend their careers designing buildings one at a time. At Vessel, we're doing something fundamentally different.

We believe the building itself can become a product: thoughtfully designed, relentlessly engineered, continuously improved, and produced with the precision and discipline we expect from the world's best consumer products.

Housing today is too expensive to build, too slow to produce, too complicated to operate, and too often disappointing to live in

We don't believe incremental improvements to the way buildings are constructed will solve that, so we're redesigning the building itself

Vessel brings together architecture, engineering, manufacturing, technology, and first-principles thinking to build an entirely new generation of multifamily buildings

We're backed by institutional partners including Lennar, America's largest homebuilder, and our buildings are already home to residents in the United States

Now we're looking for an exceptional architect to help us design what comes next.

This Is Not a Traditional Architecture Job

At Vessel, our architects are much closer to industrial designers than traditional project architects. You'll work on a product, not a single building.

You won't design a building, document it, hand it over, and start again

You'll study how people actually live in Vessel buildings, and visit completed ones to see what we got right and what we didn't

You'll rethink a kitchen because residents use it differently than we imagined

You'll investigate new materials that could make a home better, simpler, or more durable

You'll prototype ideas with engineers and challenge assumptions that have existed in architecture for decades

Then you'll make the product better. Again and again.

The work is fast, hands-on, and crosses traditional professional boundaries. Because we're still building both our products and the company itself, an exceptional person can have an outsized impact very quickly.

If what you want is a conventional career at an architecture firm, this probably isn't the job. If you want to help invent a new way of creating buildings, it might be.

What You'll Work On

Design the Product

• Help shape the architectural design of Vessel's products, from how a resident moves through an apartment to layouts, circulation, accessibility, materials, fixtures, and finishes
• Design for repeatability: instead of asking “what works for this project,” you'll learn to ask “what is the best solution, and how do we make it work thousands of times?”

Understand the Resident

• Spend time in Vessel buildings, observe how residents actually live, and listen to feedback
• Study what works and what doesn't, and turn those observations into product improvements
• Be as interested in people and behavior as you are in drawings

Experiment

• Research new materials, components, fixtures, finishes, technologies, and spatial ideas
• Develop concepts, prototype them with engineers, test them, and sometimes start over
• Treat every experiment as a chance to learn something, whether or not the idea works

Make Calypso Better

Help develop successive generations of Calypso, Vessel's current multifamily building platform, incorporating lessons from residents, manufacturing, construction, operations, and engineering

Help decide what belongs in the standard product, what should become an option, and what shouldn't be done at all

Help Invent What Comes Next

• Explore new Vessel products, configurations, and ways of living, beyond Calypso
• Contribute ideas that could become the products Vessel is building a decade from now

Design With Engineering, Not Around It

• Work side-by-side with Vessel's mechanical engineers, where architecture owns what the product should be and engineering owns how it gets built
• Care about manufacturability, assembly, tolerances, interfaces, cost, durability, maintenance, and repeatability, not just appearance

Understand the Rules Well Enough to Challenge Assumptions

• Develop a strong understanding of the U.S. building codes that affect our products, including accessibility, egress, and fire and life safety
• Work with our technical architecture team to build code requirements into the product from the beginning, not discover them at the end
• Learn to tell the difference between “how buildings are normally done” and “what the code actually requires”

See Your Work Become Real

• Travel periodically to Vessel projects in the United States
• Walk buildings you helped design, watch them being assembled, and talk with the people building and operating them
• Bring what you learn back to Tel Aviv and make the next one better

Who We're Looking For

We're less interested in checking every box than in finding an unusually talented person with the right way of thinking. You probably have around 5–8 years of professional experience in architecture, industrial design, product design, or a closely related discipline.

More importantly, you

• Are intensely curious
• Are a systems thinker
• Care deeply about how people experience the things you design
• Like getting into the details
• Enjoy research and experimentation
• Are comfortable questioning assumptions
• Want to understand how things are actually made
• Are excited by working directly with engineers
• Are comfortable moving quickly and figuring things out as you go
• Have high standards but don't need a large organization or elaborate process around you to do great work
• Want responsibility, not simply assignments

Also

Working knowledge of Revit and fluent written and spoken English

Experience with SolidWorks, interiors, prefabrication, DFMA, manufacturing, modular construction, or productized building systems is useful, but less important than intelligence, curiosity, taste, and the ability to learn quickly

A U.S. architecture license is a plus, not a requirement

Why Vessel

There aren't many opportunities in an architect's career to help create an entirely new category of building. This is one of them.

Join a small, multidisciplinary team where architects and engineers work together every day

Get direct exposure to decisions that matter and enormous room to experiment

See ideas move from a sketch or conversation in Tel Aviv to an actual home in the United States

Work at a fast pace, because the problem is urgent: housing is one of the largest industries in the world, and one of the least transformed by modern product design, engineering, and manufacturing

Competitive compensation, performance incentives, and equity participation, together with Israeli statutory benefits and additional employee-support programs

An office steps from HaShalom Railway Station and the Yehudit light rail stop

Build Something That Matters

• A home is perhaps the most consequential product most people will ever experience. It affects how we sleep, eat, work, raise families, spend time alone, and live together.
• We think it deserves the same imagination, rigor, and relentless attention to detail that the world's best companies bring to the products they create.
• Come help us reinvent it.