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 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.

🌱 Growth & Progression
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

💸 Compensation
Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).
Progression = impact. Pay increases come with increased level and scope. We invest in your growth, not just reward it after the fact.

🤝 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.

How we hire

We aim to hire fast and fairly — clarity over games. Our ideal process is: apply one week, offer the next. Here’s what that looks like:

Recruiter chat
We’ll check the basics — your availability, compensation expectations, and whether this feels like a mutual fit.

Meeting with me
I’ll want to understand how you work, what matters to you in a design role, and how we can support your best work A deep dive into a past project (or two) will follow. We’ll look for clear storytelling, design thinking, collaboration, and the impact of your work.

Design task session
You’ll work on a real product problem — shaping it, exploring options, and figuring out how you think.

Culture & collaboration chat
You’ll meet a few of the people you’d be working alongside — outside of the product sphere. This is where we get a sense of what it’s like to work at Zen. Expect a relaxed, candid chat about team dynamics, values, and ways of working.

We believe in feedback, but only share it if you ask for it. If you want it, just say so — we’ll be honest and constructive about how we saw things.

Sound exciting? Let’s talk.
If you read all this and thought “hell yes” (even if it’s a slightly nervous one), then please apply. If you skimmed and thought “maybe,” apply anyway — you’ll get a clearer sense once we chat. We’re always open to great people, even if the timing isn’t perfect.
We currently have a clear need for one more Senior Product Designer to join the team — maybe it’s you?

Diversity and Inclusion
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.