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High-level bits to keep in mind
Location: Chicago | 3 days per week onsite
Type: Full-time
About the role
Hi, I'm JC, Head of Design at Zen Educate.
I started sketching out the first versions of our product on evenings and weekends - before we had a team, a logo, or an office. Today, I lead our growing design function as we take on more complex, ambitious challenges across the UK and US.
We're looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design - and is excited by the idea of not just designing solutions, but helping bring them to life end-to-end.
This is not a traditional design role.
At Zen, design is evolving into a product-building discipline. That means moving fluidly from problem framing - flows - prototypes - real, working product - often within the same role.
You'll still care deeply about users, clarity, and craft. But you'll also be excited to own more of how things actually work and get shipped.
How this role is evolving
Design at Zen is becoming more end-to-end.
Our designers don't just define problems and create interfaces - they increasingly shape solutions, prototype them in code, and help ship them into production.
With tools like Lovable, Claude, and others, the line between design, product, and engineering is blurring. We're leaning into that.
In practice, this means:

• Moving faster from idea - prototype - live product
• Owning more of the "how it works," not just "how it looks"
• Reducing handoffs and increasing accountability
• Treating design as a core product-building discipline, not a stage in a process

You don't need to be an engineer, but you should be motivated to take ideas beyond design and into real, shipped product experiences.
What you'll do

• Own problems end-to-end - from discovery through to shipped product.
• Design flows, systems, and interfaces that are simple, scalable, and high-quality.
• Stay close to the customer - building a deep understanding of educators, schools, and internal teams, and how they actually work day-to-day.
• Build and contribute to our research machine - continuously learning through interviews, observation, data, and real product usage.
• Turn insight into action - shaping problems, validating direction, and informing what gets built (not just justifying decisions after the fact).
• Create fast feedback loops - testing ideas early through prototypes, conversations, and live experiments.
• Prototype and validate ideas quickly, using modern tools (including AI-assisted ones).
• Bring ideas to life beyond static design - exploring interaction, logic, and behaviour in real environments.
• Collaborate deeply with engineers and PMs, while increasingly contributing directly to implementation.
• Use judgement to balance speed vs quality, shipping early and iterating often.
• Synthesize and share learning - building shared understanding across the team, not letting insight sit in silos.
• Mentor other designers and contribute to raising the bar across the team.
• Shape how we work, as design continues to evolve at Zen.

What we're building
Getting the right educator into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem.
Done well, it improves outcomes for children and puts more money into classrooms (we've already saved UK schools over £50 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education.
Our platform supports:

• Educators finding meaningful work.
• Schools managing short- and long-term staffing needs.
• Internal teams matching supply and demand efficiently.

We're well established in the UK and rapidly growing in the US, which brings a constant stream of complex, high-impact design challenges across workflows, systems, and experiences.
What the role looks like in practice
You'll work across the full product lifecycle - from early discovery through to delivery, with a focus on user outcomes, speed of learning, and design quality.
A typical loop might look like:

• Speaking to educators or school staff to understand a problem in depth.
• Synthesising insights (e.g. in tools like Dovetail) to shape a clear direction.
• Rapidly exploring solutions through flows, prototypes, or lightweight builds - often going beyond or bypassing Figma.
• Testing ideas early - through conversations, interactive prototypes, or live experiments.
• Iterating quickly based on feedback and real usage.
• Collaborating closely with engineers - and sometimes writing or shaping production code (e.g. via tools like Claude).
• Shipping improvements and continuing to learn.

You'll operate in tight loops between customer insight - prototype - shipped product - learning - helping us close the gap between idea and reality, and ensuring what we build is grounded in real needs.
How we work

• Design is a partner, not a service - you'll co-own problems and drive delivery.
• Builders, not just designers - we value people who can take ideas to reality.
• Lean over large - quick flows, sharp critiques, fast iteration.
• Bias to ship - progress over perfection.
• Design system is evolving - you'll help shape it.

Growth & progression

• Choose your own adventure - shape your path based on strengths and interests.
• Expand your craft - into prototyping, technical fluency, and product building.
• Levels, not titles - growth is about scope and impact.
• High ownership, low bureaucracy - lead your work without micromanagement.

Team & culture

• Small design team, big ambitions. You won't get lost in a 50-person design org, and you'll help define what "great" looks like.
• Async and face-to-face collaboration. Iterative sharing, with structured rituals and casual touch points to stay aligned and connected.
• Mission-led and user-focused. Our product isn't a vanity tool or a growth hack. It's a platform with deep real-world impact.
• Still scrappy in places. Not everything is polished or perfectly resourced. If you like clean chaos and building things properly, you'll thrive.

Compensation
Market reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that's not just where you live). We don't believe anyone has found a great solution to global compensation, so we aim instead to be clear and equitable in how we do it.
Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won't beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).
Think long term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn't the right time to join us.
Hiring process
We aim to hire fast and fairly - clarity over games. Our ideal process is: apply one week, offer the next. Here's what that looks like:
Recruiter chat
We'll check the basics - your availability, compensation expectations, and whether this feels like a mutual fit.
Meeting with me
I'll want to understand how you work, what matters to you in a design role, and how we can support your best work A deep dive into a past project (or two) will follow. We'll look for clear storytelling, design thinking, collaboration, and the impact of your work.
Design task session
You'll work on a real product problem, shaping it, exploring options, and figuring out how you think.
We believe in feedback, but only share it if you ask for it. If you want it, just say so - we'll be honest and constructive about how we saw things.
Sound exciting?
If you read all this and thought "hell yes" (even if it's a slightly nervous one), then please apply. If you skimmed and thought "maybe," apply anyway, you'll get a clearer sense once we chat. We're always open to great people, even if the timing isn't perfect.
We currently have a clear need for one more Senior Product Designer to join the team, maybe it's you?
Diversity & Inclusion
At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all.
We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives - just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We believe in hiring the best people from the widest pool and creating an inclusive culture where people's voices are heard and all our team can look forward to coming to work.
We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all. We seek out diverse opinions, beliefs, and experiences because they collectively make us stronger; we've had former teachers, pilots, fundraisers, engineers, lawyers, marketers, social media experts and more join our team.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.