Senior Product Designer

$200,000 USD/year ^{Pay is set based on global value, not the local market. Most roles = hourly rate x 40 hrs x 50 weeks}  ($100 USD/hour)

You'll be joining a learning model with documented results. Alpha School's students complete their core academics in two hours daily and score in the nation's top percentiles. LearnWithAI powers the platform and is scaling rapidly across the US and internationally. The infrastructure exists. What's needed now is a designer who centers their work on the people using it.

Your mandate is to establish design excellence, create the standards, and build this function from the ground up. You'll focus on our learning platform and the applications that support it, serving multiple audiences both within and beyond Alpha.
Consider a five-year-old who hasn't learned to read yet, discovering numbers through an interface that must make exploration feel effortless. Think about a teenager working two grade levels below their age, rebuilding trust after repeated academic setbacks—a single unclear interaction could undo that progress. Picture a parent finally understanding their child's learning journey; that transparency reduces stress and turns them into an active partner. An academic coach overseeing students of varied ages needs visibility into progress without information overload. Your role demands understanding each user deeply enough to design meaningfully different experiences for each.

You own the experience layer: conduct thorough research into each audience, translate findings into design principles engineers can implement directly, and deliver code-ready outputs that ship immediately rather than static deliverables that stall in feedback loops. You'll collaborate with product leaders accountable for results and engineers who deploy production code. When a request compromises user experience, you challenge it. The responsibility is yours, start to finish.

AI becomes your force multiplier for faster iteration and broader coverage, but your design judgment—not algorithmic suggestions—determines what reaches users. Primary focus remains our education platform, with intermittent work in other areas.