Staff Product Designer, Language and Literature (30 months fixed-term)

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.

THE ROLE

Imagine being a teacher in Sarasota, Florida with a classroom full of 6th graders who haven’t had a normal year of school or learning since before the COVID pandemic. It’s the reality of so many educators and students who use Khan Academy – and our team is uniquely positioned to help them when they need it most.

We have no end of fascinating challenges that can only be solved with a deep understanding of our users, diligent product & UX thinking, and a strong drive to make a positive impact. Some questions we’re working on answering right now are:

• How do we support district teachers and administration with the resources they need to improve reading comprehension?
• How do we help students with learning gaps catch up to their grade level?
• How do we center schools serving historically under-resourced communities in our product design and development?
• How do we reach more school districts so our learning experience gets used in more classrooms?
• …and more

The best part? Our work really matters: catch Sal talking to CNBC about low math and reading test scores.

We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer (30 months fixed-term) to join a newly formed Language and Literature team. The heart of this role is driving the end-to-end design strategy and solutions for efficacious, AI-driven reading comprehension and writing solutions for secondary classrooms. We’re looking for someone who can approach a suite of products as a system – not just mockups and prototypes, but work cross-functionally to meet business objectives and create a competitive advantage in the market. 

Some of the things you will work on immediately:

• Increasing engagement and usability of the flagship Writing Coach product
• Develop AI reading skill practice activities for teacher and learner in-classroom use
• Design tools to better support humanities teacher workflows

You will play a vital role on an inclusive, small but mighty Design team, helping us fulfill the mission of the organization: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We genuinely care about people and value compassion in our everyday interactions. You’ll be able to be yourself, feel valued, supported, learn and grow, no matter how experienced you are.

If you’re looking for the opportunity to shape the future of learning by shipping high-quality tools and solutions that help solve real problems for learners and educators, please don’t hesitate to apply — we’d love to hear from you.

What you’ll do:

• Leverage your product design and systems thinking skills to form and advocate for a clear  Design POV for a newly formed team rapidly experimenting with ELA solutions.
• Create end-to-end design artifacts, across customer journey mapping, wireframing, low-high fidelity mockups, rapid prototyping, to test hypotheses around solutions impacting reach and engagement.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, User Research, Content, and Partnerships to iterate on existing products and design new experiences.
• Integrate useful generative AI features into new experiences that support the Jobs-to-be-Done of ELA Teachers
• Set a standard of operational excellence by driving the design side of projects effectively through strong project management, lightning-fast execution on design iterations, and clear communication of validated rationale.
• Join the cross-functional group that maintains our desi