Staff Product Designer, Khan Academy
Language and Literature - 30 months fixed-term
$152.9-173k
More information about location
Nonprofit online education platform
Open for applications
Nonprofit online education platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$152.9-173k
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- You have at least 10+ years of relevant experience on an in-house product design team
- You are outstanding across interaction design, prototyping, and information architecture, with strong visual design chops
- You have the ability to juggle ambiguous and broad problems/opportunities along with smaller well-defined projects
- You are a critical participant in design reviews, both in delivering feedback to teammates to strengthen their work, but also in soliciting feedback at every step of the process
- You have exceptional verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical partners, internally and externally
- You are comfortable in ambiguous situations and dynamic environments that run similar to a startup, where you regularly interact with and gather feedback from Senior Leadership
- You are scrappy, have a bias toward action, and love moving fast
- You know how to build strong relationships cross-functionally and bring people into the conversation when their input and buy-in is crucial
- You bring a lean approach to product design and regularly ask yourself: how do we learn quickly and ship regularly? What’s the most concise experience we can deliver that still provides value?
- Ideally, you have prior understanding of English Language Arts education and/or experience designing for complex, user-facing content experiences
- Qualities we value in ourselves, and those who join our team:
- Introspective, mature, low-ego, and emotionally intelligent
- Growth mindset, willingness to learn and to teach others
- Proactively seek out the people and info you need to move work forward and unblock yourself
- High comfort level working within a strong top-down product vision led by our CEO, Sal Khan
- Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next
- Comfortable with ever-shifting priorities and ambiguous situations, like you’d experience in a startup
- Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of other, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization
- Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script
- Excited about education and engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and why people learn
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer (30 months fixed-term) to join a newly formed Language and Literature team
- The heart of this role is driving the end-to-end design strategy and solutions for efficacious, AI-driven reading comprehension and writing solutions for secondary classrooms
- We’re looking for someone who can approach a suite of products as a system – not just mockups and prototypes, but work cross-functionally to meet business objectives and create a competitive advantage in the market
- Increasing engagement and usability of the flagship Writing Coach product
- Develop AI reading skill practice activities for teacher and learner in-classroom use
- Design tools to better support humanities teacher workflows
- You will play a vital role on an inclusive, small but mighty Design team, helping us fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere
- You’ll be able to be yourself, feel valued, supported, learn and grow, no matter how experienced you are
- If you’re looking for the opportunity to shape the future of learning by shipping high-quality tools and solutions that help solve real problems for learners and educators, please don’t hesitate to apply — we’d love to hear from you
- Leverage your product design and systems thinking skills to form and advocate for a clear Design POV for a newly formed team rapidly experimenting with ELA solutions
- Create end-to-end design artifacts, across customer journey mapping, wireframing, low-high fidelity mockups, rapid prototyping, to test hypotheses around solutions impacting reach and engagement
- Partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, User Research, Content, and Partnerships to iterate on existing products and design new experiences
- Integrate useful generative AI features into new experiences that support the Jobs-to-be-Done of ELA Teachers
- Set a standard of operational excellence by driving the design side of projects effectively through strong project management, lightning-fast execution on design iterations, and clear communication of validated rationale
- Join the cross-functional group that maintains our design systems, propose changes and additions to our design systems, review what other designers propose and help maintain internal consistency and usability
- Build alignment across diverse teams by being able to successfully present ideas to a range of teams and stakeholders across Khan Academy
- Cultivate a growth mindset (another one of our values) by soliciting feedback on solutions from key stakeholders and learning how to partner effectively with Brand and Visual Design to ensure what you ship looks and feels like Khan Academy
- Invest in our org by mentoring, coaching and developing both your Design team comrades and your cross-functional partners
- Write about, present, and share what you have learned, both internally and with the wider Design community via our blog and industry events
Application process
- Submitting a portfolio with your application is required
- We're looking for a portfolio that highlights the parts of your background and experience that are relevant to the job description
- Applications without a portfolio link or attachment (plus password if required) will not be considered
Our take
Khan Academy is a non-profit that provides free online education materials, including teacher tools, instruction videos, and practice exercises to support users of all ages. It has over 10 million users a month and covers subjects all the way up to college level.
With nearly a quarter of American adults unable to use mathematics in daily life, Khan Academy’s interactive quizzes, instructional videos, and teacher tools are timely. Khan Academy started life as a series of educational YouTube videos, before building a full-scale platform after receiving an influx of donations from Silicon Valley philanthropists. This background has led it to embrace rather than reject the educational possibilities of new tech such as AI, with the founder regarding traditional institution's banning of tools like ChatGPT as a mistake.
The company offers its tools completely for free, instead relying on donations and volunteers. A key focus is tackling wealth inequality in education. A partnership with the College Board (who produce entrance examinations for higher education) has made access to SAT test prep materials free for millions. 2024 saw a partnership with Microsoft for Khan Academy's Khanmigo product, now free to use for Microsoft customers.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Jul 2020
$3m
GRANT
Oct 2017
$3m
GRANT
Total funding: $16.2m
Company benefits
- Flexible spending account (FSA)
- Dental insurance
- Optical insurance
- Life insurance
- Performance bonus
- 401K plan
- Family medical leave
- Diversity program
- Pet friendly workplace
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Affinity groups where Parents, Black, Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Leadership
Caroline Hu Flexer
(CEO)Holds a BA and MArch in Architecture from Stanford and Harvard University. They also have an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and formerly co-founded Duck Duck Moose, a mobile educational platform for children.
Salman Khan
(Executive Director)They graduated from Harvard Business School and have previously worked in Finance.
Salary benchmarks
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