Senior Product Designer, Zen Educate
£60-70k
Senior and Expert level
London
Remote from UK
More information about location
Education recruitment platform
Be an early applicant
Education recruitment platform
201-500 employees
B2BMarketplaceEducationRecruitment
Be an early applicant
£60-70k
Senior and Expert level
London
Remote from UK
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
- 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
- If you read all this and thought “hell yes” (even if it’s a slightly nervous one), then please apply
- 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 the job involves
- I’m looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design
- Design at Zen is about shaping problems, navigating ambiguity, collaborating with conviction — and crafting simple, scalable, elegant experiences that make a real difference
- What we are building and why
- Getting the right teacher 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 £30 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education
- Our platform helps teachers 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.”
- “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.”
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Salary benchmarks
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: $103.7m
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
- 25 days of holidays + all UK public holidays off
- Central London dog-friendly office with perks like fresh fruit, bike parking, showers, and an on-site gym and café
- Life insurance
- Vitality health insurance and benefits
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- Electric Car Scheme
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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