Senior E2E Product Designer

Zen Educate, Chicago

The role

High-level bits to keep in mind 🔍

Location: Chicago based & collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe.

Type: Full-time

Salary: $100-130K

👋 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.

All jobs

Senior E2E Product Designer

Zen Educate, Chicago

Posted pay

$100K–$130K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is below the median for senior design jobs in other US places.

Median: $165K a year
Other jobs in the group: 146

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: Chicago
Work type: Onsite
Level: Senior
Posted: 14 days ago
Last check: 13 h ago
Job type: Design

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Zen Educate

Open tech jobs: 5
With posted pay: 60%

About Zen Educate: funding, hiring and pay

Zen Educate

About Zen Educate: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

High-level bits to keep in mind 🔍

Location: Chicago based & collaborating with teams on the West Coast and in Europe.

Type: Full-time

Salary: $100-130K

👋 About the role

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

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.

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

Pay and benefits

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