Senior Product Designer, Khan Academy
Learner Assessments
$127.4-138.3k
Salary shown applicable to US based candidates only. For candidates based in Canada, the salary is $172,188 - $186,875 CAN
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US
San Francisco Bay Area
Nonprofit online education platform
Open for applications
Nonprofit online education platform
1001+ employees
B2CEducationLearningCharity
Open for applications
$127.4-138.3k
Salary shown applicable to US based candidates only. For candidates based in Canada, the salary is $172,188 - $186,875 CAN
Senior and Expert level
Remote in Canada, US
San Francisco Bay Area
1001+ employees
B2CEducationLearningCharity
Company mission
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.
Role
Who you are
- Because this role offers the opportunity to develop new interaction patterns and visual cues, previous experience contributing to a design system is required
- You have at least 6+ years of relevant experience on an in-house product design team
- You have at least 5+ years of conducting research and working collaboratively with a UX research team
- You have 4+ years of experience designing accessible experiences
- You are outstanding across interaction design, prototyping, and information architecture, with visual design chops
- 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 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 strong verbal and written communication skills for technical and non-technical partners, internally and externally
- 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?
- Introspective, mature, low-ego, and emotionally intelligent
- Growth mindset, willingness to learn and to teach others
- Proactively seek out the people/information you need to move work forward and unblock yourself
- High comfort level working within a strong top-down product and pedagogical vision led by our CEO, Sal Khan, and our Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, PhD
- Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what’s next
- Comfortable with frequent change and ambiguous situations, like you’d experience in a startup
- 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
- Imagine being a teacher in Sarasota, Florida with a classroom full of 6th graders who haven’t had a normal year of school or learning since before the COVID pandemic
- It’s the reality of so many educators and students who use Khan Academy – and our team is uniquely positioned to help them when they need it most
- We have no end of fascinating challenges that can only be solved with a deep empathy for our users, diligent product & UX thinking, and a strong drive to make a positive impact. Some questions we’re working on answering right now are:
- How do we support teachers who are dealing with the impact that the pandemic had on learning?
- How do we help students with learning gaps catch up to their grade level?
- How do we center schools serving historically under-resourced communities in our product design and development?
- How do we reach more school districts so our learning experience gets used in more classrooms?
- …and more
- We’re looking for a Senior Product Designer to deliver innovative K-12 assessment solutions
- The heart of this role will be designing accessible and innovative product experiences for students in a scrappy, iterative environment
- You should feel at home working in ambiguity and charting a path forward
- Along with product and engineering, you will help define critical areas for re-imagining the Assessments experience, leveraging expertise from subject matter experts, new capabilities from generative AI, and data from our pilot studies
- Additionally, you will be ensuring our experience is accessible and is integrated into our larger product portfolio
- You will play a vital role on an inclusive, collaborative, small but mighty Design team, helping us fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere
- We genuinely care about people and value compassion in our everyday interactions
- 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 design and ship high-quality, innovative products that solve real problems for learners and educators, we'd love to hear from you
- Design innovative assessment experiences for learners, positively impacting individual learning goals and metrics
- Conduct discovery work to understand key problem areas in the Assessments space
- Collaborate closely with UX research to define knowledge gaps, research plans, and execute on generative and evaluative research with support from the UX research team
- Create strategic design artifacts that help the broader organization understand how the Assessments team fits in the larger organizational product portfolio and supports our goals of deep student learning (e.g. customer journey maps, competitive analysis)
- Design WCAG AA-compliant widgets in collaboration with the Learning Components team to be prioritized for Assessment content delivery
- Regularly contribute components and style guide documentation for our design system
- Collaborate with horizontal Learner product teams to design the end-to-end experience of how Assessments integrate with the existing educational platform
- Ideate on how generative AI features can be leveraged to support item creation and assessment content development
- Partner with the Director of Assessment and Chief Learning Officer to design iterative concepts towards the shared vision for assessment
- Partner with User Research and Data teams to understand user insights from the field, and leverage to improve the design experience
- Provide thoughtful input on the product roadmap, strategy and vision for what’s next
- 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
- Build alignment across diverse teams by being able to successfully present ideas to a range of teams and stakeholders across 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 (if you have a password, please provide it). We're looking for a portfolio that demonstrates exceptional design solutions and visual design chops that are aligned to business objectives within tight timeframes and constraints
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
Led by a woman
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
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 values
- Live and breathe learners - We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners
- Take a stand - As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.
- Work responsibly and sustainably - We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.
- Embrace diverse perspectives - We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team
- Deliver wow - We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things - each of which aligns to our ambitious vision - so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.
- Cultivate learning mindset - We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals
- Bring out the joy - We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors
Company HQ
Mountain View, CA
Articles
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.
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