Senior Product Designer

Overview

Khan Academy is looking for product designers who are passionate about great design and have an ability to achieve it. Join us on our mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere!

We are recruiting an experienced designer for a new Early Product Development Team. This team will explore and propose future products in response to major open problems and opportunities facing Khan Academy.

Rather than shipping products at scale to learners in our existing product, this team will focus on ideation, rapid prototyping, and early validation. Once an embryonic product appears viable, this team will collaborate with production-oriented product teams to hand off implementation at larger scale. Think of this as a small startup team within the larger Khan Academy organization operating in a tight-knit, entrepreneurial way—but with the fringe benefits and support of a bigger company infrastructure.

The design team is a small, super diverse group of people; each member has a lot of impact and makes huge contributions across the board. As a good candidate, you will have a great portfolio with a string of successful projects in your wake. Your friends and coworkers think of you as the go-to person for at least two of these:

• Interaction design
• Prototyping skills
• User research and testing
• Early product conception
• Design systems

We expect our designers to have solid technical skills. You should have a set of tools that you love to use when designing. You’re able to show us how you’ve used them in the past to make great products, and you can walk us through your design reasoning. You can demonstrate that you’re invested in working well with your peers and other disciplines, such as engineering and PM, throughout your career – because we’re dedicated to both great quality design and great quality collaboration.

YOU NEED

• A passion for designing engaging learning experiences, as well as a desire to make the world a better place
• Excitement to contribute culturally and technically to the growth of those around you, as well as a drive to keep learning new things yourself
• Introspection, humility, maturity, excellent communication skills, and strong systematic problem solving ability
• Tolerance for the realities of early product development: you’ll generate and test lots of ideas quickly, throw out most of your work, ship none of it to production (directly), and experience permanent ambiguity around what projects you’ll be working on next month.

WE OFFER THE FOLLOWING BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team well!

• Competitive salaries and annual bonuses
• Ample paid time off as needed
• A fun, high-caliber team that believes in the importance of having a great day-to-day experience
• Delicious catered lunch daily plus tons of snacks and beverages
• Walking distance to Caltrain and downtown Mountain View, flexibility to work from other locations
• The opportunity to work on high-impact software and programs that are already impacting the future of learning
• The ability to improve real lives and put your talents toward a deeply meaningful mission
• The possibility of helping empower more problem solvers to improve the world
• Oh, and we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life

HOW TO APPLY

• Attach your resume below
• Address the following prompt in the space provided below: At Khan Academy, we believe that reaching all learners requires an engineering team that is diverse in every respect, and we are looking for individuals who will help us fulfill our mission by adding to the diversity of our team’s experiences, perspectives, and mindsets. With that in mind, tell us briefly how your experiences and perspectives— whether personal, professional, academic, or otherwise— could contribute to the diversity of our team.

LEARN MORE

• A talk by our Design Director, May-Li
• Sal’s TED talk
• Our team
• Our research blog documents prior investigations which will influence this team’s work

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status.