Senior Product Designer

Zen Educate • Chicago, IL

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

Hi, I’m JC, Head of Design at Zen Educate. I started sketching out the first versions of the product on evenings and weekends before we had a team, a logo, or an office. Now, I lead our growing design function as we tackle more complex, ambitious, and impactful problems across both sides of the Atlantic.

I’m looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design. Someone who cares deeply about users, communicates clearly, thinks in flows not screens, and is excited to partner closely with product, engineering, our commercial team and most importantly, our customers, to solve real-world problems in education.

Design at Zen is about shaping problems, navigating ambiguity, collaborating with conviction — and crafting simple, scalable, elegant experiences that make a real difference.

We’re still a small design team, which means you’ll have a lot of room to shape how we work, build design maturity across the org, and leave your fingerprints on a product with deep real-world impact.

Getting the right educator into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem. Done well, it improves children’s outcomes and gets 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 helps educators find meaningful work and schools fill roles efficiently. It supports internal operations teams matching supply and demand, mobile-first experiences for educators, and tools for schools to manage short- and long-term needs.

We’re well established in the UK and rapidly growing in the US — a market that’s similar in spirit but different in all the details. That means complex, fascinating design challenges at every level: workflow UX, service design, visual systems, information architecture, messaging, accessibility, trust, and much more.

You’ll work across the full product lifecycle — from discovery through to delivery — with a focus on user outcomes, speed of learning, and design quality. You’ll also mentor other designers, contribute to evolving our design culture, and help shape how we scale.

Like any org, we’ve made certain trade-offs that shape how we work. Here’s some context to help you decide if Zen is a good fit:

Design is a partner, not a service. You’ll co-own problems, shape solutions, and drive delivery with your squad.
Lean over large. We prefer efficiently created Figma flows, sharp critiques, and weekly iterations over lengthy decks and bloated specs.
Design system exists and is growing. But you’ll help define and evolve it — it’s not “done” or rigid.

Choose your own adventure. You’ll shape your path, not wait for a ladder to appear. We value influence, not just individual contribution.
Levels not titles. We use Levels to reflect growth and scope, not inflated titles. There’s plenty of space to stretch without switching tracks.
Shared context, not command and control. You’ll be expected to lead your work and communicate your thinking — with support but not 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.

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.

What This Job Offers

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