Senior E2E Product Designer

Who you are

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

If you've read everything below 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

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

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
• 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
• 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

Design is a partner, not a service - you’ll co-own problems and drive delivery

Builders, not just designers - we value people who can take ideas to reality

Lean over large - quick flows, sharp critiques, fast iteration

Bias to ship - progress over perfection

Design system is evolving - you’ll help shape it