design
Posted Feb 26Senior E2E Product Designer
at Zen Educate
Chicago, United StatesOn-site
Responsibilities
- Design task session You’ll work on a real product problem — shaping it, exploring options, and figuring out how you think.
Requirements
- At Zen, design is evolving into a product-building discipline.
- 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.
- 🎯 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
- 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.
Benefits
- Done well, it improves outcomes for children and puts more money into classrooms (we’ve already saved UK schools over £50 million since 2017).
- 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!).
- 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.
- 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 value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all.
Additional details
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education.