Senior E2E Product Designer, Zen Educate
CT/ET Timezone
Salary not provided
Figma
Senior and Expert level
Remote from US
More information about location
Education recruitment platform
Be an early applicant
Education recruitment platform
201-500 employees
B2BMarketplaceEducationRecruitment
Be an early applicant
Salary not provided
Figma
Senior and Expert level
Remote from US
More information about location
201-500 employees
B2BMarketplaceEducationRecruitment
Company mission
To make a positive impact and bring about meaningful change within the education recruitment sector.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design - and is excited by the idea of not just designing solutions, but helping bring them to life end-to-end
- If you've read everything below 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
What the job involves
- This is not a traditional design role
- At Zen, design is evolving into a product-building discipline. That means moving fluidly from problem framing → flows → prototypes → real, working product - often within the same role
- You’ll still care deeply about users, clarity, and craft. But you’ll also be excited to own more of how things actually work and get shipped
- Design at Zen is becoming more end-to-end
- Our designers don’t just define problems and create interfaces - they increasingly shape solutions, prototype them in code, and help ship them into production
- With tools like Lovable, Claude, and others, the line between design, product, and engineering is blurring. We’re leaning into that. In practice, this means:
- 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
- You don’t need to be an engineer, but you should be motivated to take ideas beyond design and into real, shipped product experiences
- 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
- You’ll work across the full product lifecycle - from early discovery through to delivery, with a focus on user outcomes, speed of learning, and design quality
- A typical loop might look like:
- 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
- You’ll operate in tight loops between customer insight → prototype → shipped product → learning - helping us close the gap between idea and reality, and ensuring what we build is grounded in real needs
- 💻 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
Application process
- 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
- 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
Our take
With UK schools under immense financial pressure, Zen Educate is providing a smarter approach to education staffing. Recruitment in schools often relies on inefficient and expensive practices. Zen Educate is focused on tackling the pain points in the industry and providing a way to ensure schools get the best teachers possible.
It provides an online platform as an alternative to recruitment agencies, which is the only online platform accredited by the UK's Department of Education, helping schools fill staffing needs quickly and cost-effectively. Schools using the platform have reportedly saved 20-30% on supply cover costs.
On top of this, the company has also raised significant funding to support acquisitions in the UK and the US, plus the expansion of its operations and offering.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2025
$17.7m
SERIES B
May 2024
$37m
SERIES B
Total funding: $103.2m
Company benefits
- Macbook and tech equipment provided
- Regular "lunch 'n' learns" every month on a range of topics
- Investment in your professional development
- Regular socials
- Ownership in the company
- Pension scheme
- Health benefits (Zen pays 75% of premiums) including vision and dental
Company values
- Commit to the mission- We commit to our mission, our customers, and our teams. We work hard because we care more
- Choose greatness over comfort- Greatness and comfort rarely coexist. We seek greatness. We understand success takes grit & determination so we seek colleagues that possess it
- Act like an owner- We all take responsibility for driving the company forward and making it a success. If we see something that could be better, we fix it. We offer stock options to all employees
- Help each other be better- Every person at Zen is someone we can respect and learn from
- A culture of trust- We hire people who are great at their jobs and we let them get on with it while being there to lend a hand when needed
- Challenge the status quo- We take action when we can see opportunities for improvement. We are in it to make our customers' lives better and to fix a broken system
- Embrace learning over perfection- We make decisions quickly and we don't hesitate. We may disagree with a decision, but we support the team and the mission by committing to it. We embrace making unknowable mistakes and learning from them
Company HQ
HQ, London
Articles
Leadership
Slava Kremerman
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously a member of the Leadership Team at Nutmeg a FS startup, they also worked at Barclays and Aon.
Oren Cohen
(Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer)Ran the UK office of Optimizely, a Silicon Valley tech company. Prior to this, they worked at G-STAT and Intel.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Zen Educate
- 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
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