Verkada Cover Letter

Dear Verkada Hiring Team,

I'm a first-year EECS student at UC Berkeley applying for the Industrial Design Intern role. My background isn't the standard ID path, I come at product design from the hardware side, building the connected electronics that live inside enclosures like yours. I'd like to contribute to the ID team as the intern who sits closest to the boards.

At Cal Space Technologies and Rocketry (STAR), I design custom PCBs in Altium for high-power rockets targeting ~30,000 ft apogee, with ESP32/C++ firmware for sensor fusion, telemetry, and recovery. Every board is a packaging problem designed around mass, volume, thermal, vibration, and moisture constraints. I spend hours arguing tradeoffs with mechanical leads about where a board can fit, how it mounts, and what has to give to close the enclosure. That's the exact ID/EE collaboration Verkada's hardware team should run every day.

On the tool side: Fusion 360 and SolidWorks daily, 3D printing and laser cutting regularly, CAD/CAM across STAR and prior robotics work. No Rhino or Keyshot yet but I'll pick them up.

What draws me to Verkada is the product range. Cameras, sensors, access control, intercoms, alarms, and they all have to read as one coherent physical and visual language across indoor and outdoor environments. That's a harder problem than most connected-device companies take on, and most of it lives in the ID/hardware handoff. I'd contribute on the prototyping and engineering-collaboration side: running 3D prints, testing fit with hardware, pressure-testing form decisions against what the boards actually need.

I'd welcome the chance to contribute to Verkada's ID team this summer. Thank you for your consideration.

Roshan Taneja