Senior E2E Product Designer

Zen Educate, London

The role

High-level bits to keep in mind 🔍

Location: Our HQ is based in London (Oval)

Type: Full-time

👋 About the role

Hi, I’m JC, Head of Design at Zen Educate.

I started sketching out the first versions of our product on evenings and weekends - before we had a team, a logo, or an office. Today, I lead our growing design function as we take on more complex, ambitious challenges across the UK and US.

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.

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.

What you will do

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.

🏗 What we’re building

Getting the right educator into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem.

Done well, it improves outcomes for children and puts more money into classrooms (we’ve already saved UK schools over £50 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education.

Our platform supports

Educators finding meaningful work.
Schools managing short- and long-term staffing needs.
Internal teams matching supply and demand efficiently.

We’re well established in the UK and rapidly growing in the US which brings a constant stream of complex, high-impact design challenges across workflows, systems, and experiences.

🛠 What the role looks like in practice

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.

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.

💸 Compensation

Market reality. Compensation is based on your competitiveness in your local hiring market (note that’s not just where you live). We don’t believe anyone has found a great solution to global compensation, so we aim instead to be clear and equitable in how we do it.

Solid, but not flashy compensation. We pay decently, but we won’t beat out companies with deeper pockets (yet!).

Think long term investment. If you are in a place where you need to prioritise immediate financial gain then this probably isn’t the right time to join us.

🧪 Hiring 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.

🙌 Sound exciting?

If you read all this 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.

We currently have a clear need for one more Senior Product Designer to join the team - maybe it’s you?

Senior E2E Product Designer

The role

Senior E2E Product Designer

The role

What you will do

Our platform supports

A typical loop might look like

In practice, this means

Growth & progression

Team & culture

About Zen Educate

Similar jobs at other companies

Senior Product Designer (f/m/d)

Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer

Senior Product Designer

Senior Product UX Designer

Senior Product Designer

Interview questions

Zen Educate