Lead Specialist, Design

About the team

Our charter is simple to state and ambitious to deliver: build what Pearson does next. We are a small, newly formed team within Pearson's Enterprise Learning & Skills (ELS) division, creating entirely new products for our enterprise clients rather than improving existing ones.

Our starting point is an asset few companies can claim. Pearson has nearly two centuries of history and, with it, one of the world's deepest bodies of learning content, assessment data, and credentialing expertise. AI has transformed what that heritage makes possible. Our mission is to bring it to bear in new and distinctive ways - solving problems for our customers that could not be solved before AI.

That charter is intentionally broad. Each product may address a different challenge for the organizations we serve, but everything we build shares three characteristics:

• It will always involve integrations. Our products operate inside our clients' ecosystems - learning platforms, HR systems, identity providers, and data pipelines - and must work seamlessly with all of them.

• It will almost always build on other Pearson products. Pearson's portfolio spans assessment, qualifications, credentials, learning content, and workforce skills. We combine these capabilities - and the data and insight behind them - in ways that were not possible before, collaborating across the company as much as within the team.

• It will be researched and validated before it scales. We take an evidence-led approach: concepts are tested with real customers, and only those that prove their value move forward. Some ideas will be retired and others will advance - both outcomes are signs of a disciplined process.

The team is built around senior individual contributors - design engineers, product engineers, and a zero-to-one product manager - who work as peers from initial concept to shipped product.

You think like a designer and build like an engineer. As a Senior Design Engineer on this team, you'll take new product concepts from first sketch to interactive prototype to production-quality interface - sometimes in the same week. There's no handoff here: you design in Figma, in code, and in whatever AI tool gets you to the answer fastest, then put the result in front of real users at real enterprise clients.

This is a senior individual contributor role. There are no direct reports; your influence comes from craft, evidence, and trust.

• Prototype new product concepts in code (React/Type Script or similar) at whatever fidelity the question demands - from disposable spikes to polished, demo-ready experiences used in client validation.

• Design and build the user-facing layer of new products end to end: interaction design, information architecture, visual design, motion, and the front-end code behind all of it.

• Make composed products feel like one product. Our concepts stitch together other Pearson products and third-party enterprise systems; you make those seams invisible to learners and administrators.

• Establish lightweight design foundations for each new bet - patterns, components, tokens - with enough system to move fast, and not so much that it calcifies around ideas we might kill.

• Plan and run validation alongside the product manager: usability sessions, concept tests, and prototypes built specifically as research instruments.

• Ship accessible by default. For enterprise learning products, WCAG conformance is a floor, not a feature.

• Flex to what the bet needs - some weeks that's deep in the codebase alongside the product engineer; others it's entirely in research, facilitation, or design.

• Relevant of experience spanning product design and front-end engineering in any mix, with a portfolio of shipped products and prototypes you can walk us through.

• Strong front-end craft: modern Type Script/JavaScript, React or a comparable framework, and CSS you're genuinely proud of.

• Real design skill - typography, layout, color, interaction, and motion - plus the judgment to know when polish matters and when speed does.

• Fluency across the modern toolchain:
  Figma for design, and AI-assisted workflows (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Copilot) as a natural part of how you explore and build.

• Experience designing for complex systems: multi-role products, data-heavy interfaces, or integration-rich enterprise environments.

• Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to apply them in practice.

• The autonomy to operate in ambiguous, zero-to-one contexts, and the communication skills to bring others along with you.

• Involvement with the web standards community (W3C, WHATWG) - through working groups, community groups, or deep working knowledge of the standards themselves.

• Familiarity with learning technology standards and ecosystems: LTI, SCORM, xAPI, QTI, Caliper, and the LMS/LXP platforms our clients run.

• Committee or working-group experience - you know how to move ideas through structured, multi-stakeholder processes.

• Research experience, whether user…