Head Of Design

Quizlet • San Francisco, CA

19h • $212,000 - $289,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

This role has a deliberate arc. You'll join as a hands-on principal designer: for your first several months, your job is to get your hands dirty shipping the future of Quizlet — setting the visual and experiential direction of our next-generation learning experience and building it yourself, using AI tooling that lets a single designer produce working, production-quality prototypes at a pace that used to require a team. Once you've shipped and learned deep context, you'll step up to lead design across the company — managing our product designers and the contractor network behind our brand and marketing work. You'll report to the VP User Experience and work daily with product, engineering, and marketing leadership. If you've been waiting for a role where you get to both define what a company looks and feels like and build it with your own hands, this is it.
We’re happy to share that this is an Hybrid position in our San Francisco/NYC office. To support collaboration, we ask employees to be in the office at least three days a week: Wednesday and Thursday.

Requirements

• 15+ years of product design experience, including consumer products at significant scale, with a portfolio demonstrating principal-level craft and strong visual taste.
• Proven systems design ability: you've designed and maintained design systems spanning multiple surfaces that other contributors could pick up and run with.
• Fluency operating at both altitudes — setting design strategy and creative direction, and personally executing polished work at high velocity when the workload demands it.
• An AI-first design practice: you already use AI tools to design, prototype, and ship faster, and you're eager to push that further.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally — navigating difficult conversations and competing priorities across product, engineering, and marketing with low ego and high effectiveness.
• Comfort with the arc of this role: hands-on IC first, leadership second, in a small team where everyone builds.

Nice To Haves

• Brand marketing or creative direction experience — you've set brand strategy that ladders up to company vision, defined illustration systems, or led a rebrand.
• Agency background, with the range and speed that comes from building across unfamiliar categories.
• Motion design and animation chops.
• Experience managing and project-managing contract designers.
• A genuine interest in learning science and education — the "why" behind everything we build.
• Ambition to grow with the role: our five-year vision is that this person builds and leads the design organization of an AI-native company that redefines how the world learns.

Responsibilities

• Design core learning experiences used by 60M+ learners generating 1B+ interactions per week — work where a small improvement reaches more students than almost any product in education.
• Set the visual and experiential direction for the future of Quizlet, and ship it: working prototypes built with AI-assisted design and development tooling, not static mockups handed over a wall.
• Build and maintain design systems that span product, marketing, and internal tools — systems robust enough that contractors, PMs, and marketers can build with them without heavy oversight, and that evolve as the product does.
• Own how design learns — partner with user research, data science and product marketing to turn learner insight, market trends, and brand signals into design standards the whole team builds against.
• Execute high-visibility brand and marketing design when the work demands it: campaigns, feature identities, executive and board presentations, motion work, and launch moments.
• Transition into leading the design organization — hiring, developing, and managing designers and a contractor network across product and brand, and owning design quality company-wide, with final sign-off on the look, feel, and experience of everything we ship.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, marketing, and executive leadership to navigate competing priorities and keep design velocity high as the company moves fast.
• Champion an AI-first way of working across design — raising the bar for what one designer can ship and helping the whole team operate at that new speed.

Benefits

• Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance
• 20 vacation days that we expect you to take!
• Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice)
• Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match
• Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth
• Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits
• 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed