Product Designer Jobs in Reston, VA (NOW HIRING)

Start Date: ASAP, Summer 2026

Role Type: Full-Time, Salaried

Location: Remote, USA-based

Salary: $130,000 - $160,000 per year, plus benefits 

Who We Are:

The Modern Classrooms Project is a fast-growing 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers educators to build classrooms that respond to every student’s needs. Founded by two award-winning teachers, we lead a movement of educators in implementing a self-paced, mastery-based instructional model that leverages technology to foster human connection, authentic learning, and social-emotional growth.

To date, our free online course and Virtual Mentorship Program have empowered almost 100,000 educators in 150+ countries. We’ve partnered with schools and districts nationwide to train and support both teachers and administrators, and researchers from Johns Hopkins University found “overwhelming positive support” for our approach. We are an ambitious, idealistic team and we are passionate about what we do.  

Job Description - Why we need you!  

For our first eight years, we helped educators use existing edtech tools more effectively. Now we’re building and piloting our software, to make our research-based instructional model easier for teachers to implement. We’re doing our best to make these products elegant and user-friendly, but we need an outstanding designer to own how those products look, feel, and work for the teachers and students who use them every day. We’re looking for a hands-on designer who can craft our interfaces end to end, establish the design system our products are built on, and make our software something teachers and students actually want to use.
This is a foundational design role. You’ll work closely with our founders and senior leaders, who own what we build and why, while you shape the how: the user interface, the interactions, and the words on the screen. You won’t inherit a polished design operation. You’ll help build one. If you’re energized by taking a product from rough to refined, and by watching your work get used in a real classroom, this role is for you.
 

Key Responsibilities - What you'll do:
As our first Product Designer, you’ll help shape the end-user experience of MCP’s software. You’ll report to the Chief Innovation Officer and work most closely with our Product Managers and engineering team. As the first dedicated designer for products still in their early phases, you’ll help establish how we design and do lots of hands-on design work, from journey maps to pixel-level UI to the copy in an error message. In particular, you will:

• Refine the end-to-end user experience. Map teacher, student, and administrator journeys; define information architecture; and design intuitive paths that hold up as the products grow. Keep a clear-eyed view of where users get confused, rushed, or stuck, and design those moments away.
   
• Wireframe and prototype before we build. Produce quick wireframes so scope and behavior get debated cheaply in a sketch rather than expensively in shipped code, then build and validate high-fidelity, clickable prototypes for high-stakes flows.
   
• Build and own the design system. Create and maintain a documented component library grounded in MCP’s brand and extended for product needs, so engineers can compose from consistent parts instead of reinventing patterns.
   
• Bring our product design efforts in-house. We’ve worked effectively with external design partners, but we don’t yet have a mature design operation. You’ll help us establish design best practices so that everything we build meets our teachers and their students’ needs.
   

You should apply if:
 

• You do the work yourself. You can take a flow from wireframe to high-fidelity to clickable prototype, and you’ve put your designs in front of real users to watch them struggle and succeed. You ship pixels, not just opinions about them.
   
• You think in systems. You understand information architecture and design systems. You build components that scale using auto-layout, variables, variants, and high-fidelity clickable prototypes that other designers can easily consume, and you keep a product from becoming a maze of nested menus as features pile up.
   
• You test assumptions. You’ve run usability tests and know that watching five people use something teaches you more than guessing with certainty. You’re curious about behavior, not defensive about your designs.
   
• You write, too. You treat the words in the interface as part of the design. You can make a button label, an error message, or a piece of feedback to a struggling 10-year-old clearer and kinder without being told to.
   
• You sweat the research - and the real-world constraints. Accessibility, color contrast, touch-target sizes, school-issued devices, and shaky classroom wifi are design inputs to you, not afterthoughts. You can design web apps and learning experiences that are grounded in cognitive science learning principles.
   
• You want to shape the world. You’re motivated to be part of something larger than yourself, and you believe the highest use of your craft is empowering others. You’re ready to make a real difference in educators’ and young people’s lives.
   

It would also be helpful if:

• You have edtech experience, ideally K-12: school-issued devices, district IT restrictions, limited training time, the rhythm of a school day, and the gap between what works in a demo and what works in a real classroom.
   
• You have light front-end skills, enough HTML/CSS/JS literacy to inspect a build, tweak a value, and make handoff frictionless (bonus if you can prototype in code).
   
• You’ve designed for young children and across wide age ranges, where reading level, motor skills, and attention vary enormously.
   

Compensation and Benefits

We aim to offer a competitive compensation package, as well as the opportunity to work in a fast-growing nonprofit that is on a mission to improve education worldwide. This includes:
 

• Salaried position: $130,000-$160,000 gross salary per year
• Employer-sponsored health insurance through CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
• Employer-sponsored dental and vision insurance and ancillary benefits through MetLife
• Participation in Vanguard 403(b) deferred-compensation plan with 3% employer match
• Paid Time Off, inclusive of: vacation/PTO (20 days), paid holidays, paid parental leave, sick and safe paid time off, "Me Days", and the ability to earn paid Comp time off
• Annual budget for MCP-funded Continuous Learning for the program(s) you request (available after 6 months of continuous full-time employment) 
• FSA and Dependent Care FSA access
• 1x Salary Life Insurance company-paid coverage 
• Access to Wishbone Pet Insurance Benefit
• Ability to work remotely and to set your own hours (within reason)

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STATEMENT OF NON-DISCRIMINATION: The Modern Classrooms Project is committed to equal employment opportunity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation, nationality, or ethnicity. We are strongly committed to hiring a diverse team and encourage applications from traditionally under-represented backgrounds.

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