Senior Product Designer

High-level bits to keep in mind

Location: Chicago | 3 days per week onsite

Type: Full-time

Who I am and what I am looking for

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.

Here's what we value in our designers:

Clarity over all - clear thinking, clear visuals, clear storytelling

Systems thinking - not just how a screen works, but how it fits into the wider workflow

Craft + impact - quality design isn't precious, it's purposeful

Bias to ship - perfection is a direction, not a requirement

Curiosity and candour - great design comes from great questions and honest collaboration

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.

What we are building and why

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.

What the role looks like in practice

All job descriptions are a bit abstract - so here's a snapshot of the kinds of things our designers have been doing recently:

"There's a lot of autonomy at Zen and you have the chance to carve out space for what you want to work on. You get to be involved in the whole design process from helping to define what you'll work on, to delivery - it's very collaborative. Some highlights that I'm working on would be: a design-led project to improve the teacher request flow, and helping refine the brand as we grow."

- James, Senior Product Designer on the School Team

"Lately I've been diving into some really exciting work aimed at transforming how educators engage with booking requests for daily supply in our app. We're exploring smarter, more intuitive experiences to cut down on ignored requests - unlocking better data, faster decisions, and ultimately helping us make stronger, more successful matches between educators and schools."

- Sam, Senior Product Designer on the Marketplace Team

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.

What you might like or dislike

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:

How We Work

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…