Senior E2E Product Designer

High-level bits to keep in mind

Location: Chicago | 3 days per week onsite

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.

You'll still care deeply about users, clarity, and craft. But you'll also be excited to own more of how things actually work and get shipped.

How this role is evolving

Design at Zen is becoming more end-to-end.

Our designers don't just define problems and create interfaces - they increasingly shape solutions, prototype them in code, and help ship them into production.

With tools like Lovable, Claude, and others, the line between design, product, and engineering is blurring. We're leaning into that.

In practice, this means:

• Moving faster from idea - prototype - live product
• Owning more of the "how it works," not just "how it looks"
• Reducing handoffs and increasing accountability
• Treating design as a core product-building discipline, not a stage in a process

You don't need to be an engineer - but you should be motivated to take ideas beyond design and into real, shipped product experiences.

What you'll 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
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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…