Principal Experience Architect

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre‑K – 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 181 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non‑traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve.

We know that transforming education starts in‑house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world‑class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

We're looking for an experienced Experience Architect (Principal Product Design Specialist) to join our Design team. This role exists because Khan Academy's product surface has grown—students, teachers, parents, and district admins now move across many products, tools, and touch points, and no single team owns the seams between them. You will be the person who sees the whole system: how a teacher's experience assigning a lesson connects to a student's experience completing it, how a district admin's reporting view relates to what happens in the classroom, and where our information architecture helps or hinders people trying to get things done.

You're not designing individual screens or flows day‑to‑day (though you can, and will when it matters). You're designing the underlying structure—the taxonomies, navigation models, mental models, and cross‑product patterns—that make Khan Academy feel like one coherent product rather than a collection of features. You'll partner closely with the Director of Design, product designers, PMs, and engineering leads across the org, acting as both a hands‑on contributor and a strategic advisor who keeps the "big picture" clear as individual teams move fast.

Ecosystem and information architecture:
Own and evolve the end‑to‑end product interaction model and related information architecture across Khan Academy's products—navigation systems, permission and role models, and the vocabulary we use to describe things. Ensure new features extend this architecture rather than fragment it.

• Cross‑product experience design: Map and design the journeys that span multiple products and user roles (student, teacher, parent, district admin), identifying where handoffs break down, where mental models conflict, and where consolidation or simplification would meaningfully improve the experience.
• Systems thinking and pattern‑setting: Build and maintain the artifacts that make the ecosystem legible to the rest of the org—experience maps, service blueprints, experience architecture diagrams, and design patterns—so that product teams can make locally good decisions that also add up to a coherent whole.
• Strategic advisory and design leadership: Act as a senior voice on the Design Leadership Team, weighing in on major product decisions with an eye toward long‑term coherence and scalability. Partner with design managers, PMs and technical architects to ensure architectural decisions are grounded in real user and district needs.
• Governance without gatekeeping: Develop lightweight frameworks, guidelines, and review processes…