Lead Specialist, UX Designer

Lead Specialist, UX Designer

This role aligns to industry-level titles such as “Lead Visual Designer” or “Staff Visual Designer.”

Reports to:

Group Visual Design Manager, Design Systems.

Pearson is an ed tech company whose mission is to have a direct relationship with millions of lifelong learners. As the world’s learning company with more than 18,000 employees operating in 70 countries, we provide content, assessment, and digital services to learners, educational institutions, employers, governments and other partners globally. We are committed to helping equip learners with the skills they need to enhance their world of opportunities.

We believe that wherever learning flourishes so do people.

Pearson is reimagining education for the AI era, and we need an exceptional visual design leader to help shape that transformation. As a Lead Visual Designer on the Design Systems team, you will serve as the senior design voice establishing the visual foundation for Pearson's unified design system across our Higher Education product portfolio. This is a high‑impact role where your design decisions will cascade across dozens of product teams and influence the experience of millions of learners and educators.

In this role you will own the end‑to‑end visual design quality for our design system—from defining foundational design tokens and component specifications to establishing the visual language that makes our products feel cohesive, modern, and competitive in an AI‑native education landscape. You will work at both strategic and tactical levels: setting the creative direction for how our design system evolves while also designing production‑ready components and templates that product teams can implement with confidence.

Beyond craft execution, you will be a design leader within the team. You will facilitate design critiques, mentor other designers, influence cross‑functional partners through the strength of your work and communication, and represent design thinking in discussions with product management and engineering leadership. This isn't about executing within constraints—it is about defining what excellence looks like and building the design infrastructure that makes it achievable at scale.

If you are a senior designer who combines exceptional visual craft with systems thinking, collaborative leadership, and the ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics, this role offers the creative challenge and strategic influence you are ready for.

You will own the end‑to‑end visual design quality for our design system—from defining foundational design tokens and component specifications to establishing the visual language that makes our products feel cohesive, modern, and competitive. You will work at both strategic and tactical levels while serving as a design leader within the team.

• Define and evolve the visual design language for our unified design system, establishing standards for typography, color, iconography, spacing, layout, and motion that work seamlessly across web and mobile platforms.

• Design comprehensive, production‑ready component libraries in Figma—from foundational atoms to complex organisms—ensuring each component is accessible, flexible, and documented for implementation.

• Lead the visual design direction for major product redesigns, creating high‑fidelity reference screens and templates for student and instructor experiences in our next‑generation agentic learning platform.

• Work closely with Creative Technologists to translate your visual designs into code (I.E. React components in Storybook), conduct visual QA, and create detailed motion specifications with timing, easing, and state transition behaviors.

• Lead design critiques for the team, mentor other designers, and build influential relationships with product management, engineering leadership, and key stakeholders across Pearson, advocating for design quality through clear communication and compelling rationale.

• Imagine the next generation of interaction patterns and contexts like voice user interfaces and multi‑modal interactions (AR/VR) that support our product vision well into the future.

You…