Product designer for an education platform

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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.