The door stiffness is one of the important factors for the side impact. Generally, the researches have been conducted on the assembled door. A side impact door beam is installed in a door to protect occupants from the side impact. This research is only concentrated on the side impact beam and a side impact beam is designed. The cross section is defined to have an elliptic shape. An optimization problem is defined to find the design maximizing the intrusion stiffness within the specified weight. Design variables are the radii and the thickness of the ellipsoid. The analysis of the side impact is carried out by the nonlinear finite element method. The optimization problem is solved by two methods. One is the experimental design scheme using an orthogonal array. The other is the gradient-based optimization using the response surface method(RSM). Both methods have obtained the better designs than the current one.