Design Lead

Summit K12•Austin, TX

11d

About The Position

Summit K12 is building a lean, modern design function, and you'll be at the center of it. As a Design Lead, you will own the user experience for your product area and co-steward our shared design system, while staying hands-on in Figma every day. This is a player-coach role: you will design, lead our design efforts, and partner closely with Product Managers as a trusted consultant, helping bridge the gap between our design and product teams to ensure cohesive, high-quality outcomes. We're a customer-driven, growing company — many of us came from the classrooms and districts we serve, so deep user knowledge lives in-house. We move fast: rather than lengthy research cycles, we validate with the educator expertise on our own team and quick feedback from real users. We're looking for someone who ships confidently without waiting for perfect data, uses AI tools to multiply their output, and earns influence through craft and judgment rather than title or process.

Requirements

6+ years in product/UX design, including owning a design system
Experience leading or mentoring designers while staying hands-on
Fluency in Figma and comfort managing design work in Jira
Active use of AI tools in your design workflow, and enthusiasm for operating as an AI-leveraged, lean design function
Strong grounding in user-centered design, interaction design, and Universal Design for Learning
Experience with WCAG accessibility standards, including interpreting ACRs and driving remediation
A track record of building design cohesion through cross-functional partnership — influence earned, not imposed
Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment: shipping without waiting for perfect data, with limited resources and tight timelines

Nice To Haves

EdTech experience, or deep accessibility/UDL work that translates quickly to K-12 contexts
Experience designing SaaS or platform-based products
Understanding of the workflows and daily realities of teachers, school administrators, and district leaders
Experience collaborating with distributed or global teams across time zones
Experience in lean or scaling organizations

Responsibilities

Maintain and evolve the Summit K12 design system — components, patterns, typography, color, accessibility standards, and interaction behaviors
Keep the system documented, versioned, and genuinely used, so teams move faster with it than without it
Partner with Engineering to ensure components are technically feasible and consistently implemented
Drive adoption — you and your fellow Design Leads share accountability for the system actually being used across teams, reducing UX fragmentation through enablement and reusable patterns rather than policing
Decide, jointly with your fellow Design Leads, what enters the system and when projects in your area can deviate from it, escalating consequential additions, cross-product deviations, and any calls the leads can't align on.
Act as a design consultant and force multiplier to Product Managers — in a world where a PM can spin up an AI prototype in an afternoon, you're the one who makes it shippable: coherent, accessible, and on-system
Engage early in discovery to shape solutions, not just review them at the end
Make the case for design through outcomes — demonstrate how strong UX reduces rework, support burden, and churn
Be the Design Lead your teams trust for day-to-day design calls
Spend real time in Figma — this is a shipping role, not a pure oversight role
Translate platform experience strategy into concrete, consistent navigation, workflows, and interaction patterns across all user types
Leverage AI tools (e.g., Claude, v0, Figma AI) to accelerate design and development workflows
Integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles into the design system so interaction patterns work for the full range of learner abilities
Use lightweight validation — heuristic reviews, quick user feedback loops, analytics, and support signals — in place of heavyweight research studies
Know when a decision needs evidence and when experienced judgment is enough
Advocate for accessibility, clarity, and simplicity in every experience
Set clear expectations for quality, ownership, and accountability
Run lean design workflows in Figma and Jira that support fast iteration and predictable delivery
Foster a culture of user empathy, experimentation, and low-ego collaboration
Lead, mentor and develop the designers you work with