Snowboard Designer

If you ever find yourself stranded at the top of a snow-capped mountain, take comfort in this fact: There’s more than one way to get down. If there’s a Snow Ranger nearby, you can take a snowmobile. Otherwise, you can sled, snowshoe, ski, or luge your way to the bottom. Or, thanks to the talents of a Snowboard Designer, you can snowboard!

As a Snowboard Designer, you design and engineer snowboards, which are a cross between skis and skateboards.

As a specialty Engineer, you work for a sports equipment manufacturing company that pays you to create snowboards that are safe, sporty, and fun. This requires the Snowboard Designer to be, more than anything else, a problem solver. As a result, you spend your days deciding the best materials to use in a snowboard — for example, fiberglass, carbon fiber, epoxy, steel, or wood — as well as the best shapes, being mindful of factors such as flex pattern, torque, sidecuts, waist size, and binding position.

A 200-pound man requires a different snowboard than a 100-pound woman, and a beginner requires a different snowboard than a professional, who uses his board to ride half-pipes and jumps. It’s up to you, therefore, to use the principles of math, science, and engineering to make the best boards for individual boarders and body types.

Like most Product Engineers, you spend the bulk of your days in an office using computer-aided design (CAD) software. Every once in a while, however, you get to spend a day on the slopes, testing your latest design!