👋 About the role

🧭 How this role is evolving

• Moving faster from idea → prototype → live product
• Owning more of the “how it works,” not just “how it looks”
• Reducing handoffs and increasing accountability
• Treating design as a core product-building discipline, not a stage in a process

🎯 What you’ll do

• Own problems end-to-end - from discovery through to shipped product.
• Design flows, systems, and interfaces that are simple, scalable, and high-quality.
• Stay close to the customer - building a deep understanding of educators, schools, and internal teams, and how they actually work day-to-day.
• Build and contribute to our research machine - continuously learning through interviews, observation, data, and real product usage.
• Turn insight into action - shaping problems, validating direction, and informing what gets built (not just justifying decisions after the fact).
• Create fast feedback loops - testing ideas early through prototypes, conversations, and live experiments.
• Prototype and validate ideas quickly, using modern tools (including AI-assisted ones).
• Bring ideas to life beyond static design - exploring interaction, logic, and behaviour in real environments.
• Collaborate deeply with engineers and PMs, while increasingly contributing directly to implementation.
• Use judgement to balance speed vs quality, shipping early and iterating often.
• Synthesize and share learning - building shared understanding across the team, not letting insight sit in silos.
• Mentor other designers and contribute to raising the bar across the team.
• Shape how we work, as design continues to evolve at Zen.

🏗 What we’re building

• Educators finding meaningful work.
• Schools managing short- and long-term staffing needs.
• Internal teams matching supply and demand efficiently.

🛠 What the role looks like in practice

• Speaking to educators or school staff to understand a problem in depth.
• Synthesising insights (e.g. in tools like Dovetail) to shape a clear direction.
• Rapidly exploring solutions through flows, prototypes, or lightweight builds - often going beyond or bypassing Figma.
• Testing ideas early - through conversations, interactive prototypes, or live experiments.
• Iterating quickly based on feedback and real usage.
• Collaborating closely with engineers - and sometimes writing or shaping production code (e.g. via tools like Claude).
• Shipping improvements and continuing to learn.

💻 How we work

• Design is a partner, not a service - you’ll co-own problems and drive delivery.
• Builders, not just designers - we value people who can take ideas to reality.
• Lean over large - quick flows, sharp critiques, fast iteration.
• Bias to ship - progress over perfection.
• Design system is evolving - you’ll help shape it.
  
  

🌱 Growth & progression

• Choose your own adventure - shape your path based on strengths and interests.
• Expand your craft - into prototyping, technical fluency, and product building.
• Levels, not titles - growth is about scope and impact.
• High ownership, low bureaucracy - lead your work without micromanagement.
  
  

🤝 Team & culture

• 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.
  
  

💸 Compensation

🧪 Hiring process

🙌 Sound exciting?

🌍 Diversity & Inclusion