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 

About Pearson 

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. 

The Role 

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'll 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'll 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'll 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'll be a design leader within the team. You'll 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's about defining what excellence looks like and building th