Director, Design

About the Position

The Director, Design will own design end-to-end across our consumer-facing product portfolio — driving high-impact projects from discovery through delivery while establishing the design practices and culture that will shape how we build. This is a player-coach role that combines hands-on craft excellence with strategic design leadership: you will set the bar for design quality, build out our design system and collaboration model, and push us to become an AI-native design organization. You will work closely with Product and Engineering, helping to define not just what we build, but how we work together to build it.

What You'll Do

Customer Impact & Design Execution

• Serve as the primary user experience leader for the entire product portfolio, defining actionable strategies that unify business, technology, and customer priorities
• Design process independently across multiple workstreams, producing high-quality work at pace
• Conduct and synthesize user research to ground design decisions in real student and customer needs
• Collaborate directly with Product and Engineering partners throughout the development process — not just at handoff

Design Practice & Innovation

• Build and champion sound design practices across the organization, including documentation, design critique, and quality standards
• Develop and maintain a scalable design system that enables consistency and speed across our product surface area
• Help establish the Product-Design-Engineering collaboration model, including how work is scoped, reviewed, and shipped

Leadership & Team Building

• Lead and mentor a small (initially one-person) design team with a hands-on approach, with the responsibility of growing team size, capabilities, and design operations as the product and organization
• mature
• Advocate for design and user-centricity in cross-functional forums, translating design intent clearly for non-design stakeholders
• Contribute to headcount planning and the long-term vision for design at the company

Who You Are

• Bachelor’s degree; higher level degree preferred
• Comfortable operating as an IC — you design, you prototype, you ship — while also thinking strategically about how design functions within an organization
• Proven track record building or significantly maturing design practices at a company; you've done this before and can do it here
• Strong cross-functional collaborator who can influence without authority and earn trust with Engineering and Product partners
• Clear and compelling communicator — you can present design rationale to skeptical stakeholders and make the case for investing in craft
• Experience managing or mentoring other designers; you take the growth of your team seriously
• Ed tech, consumer, or marketplace product experience a plus