You'll be joining a learning model with documented results. Alpha School's students complete their core academics in two hours daily and score in the nation's top percentiles. LearnWithAI powers the platform and is scaling rapidly across the US and internationally. The infrastructure exists. What’s needed now is a designer who centers their work on the people using it.
Your mandate is to establish design excellence, create standards, and build this function from the ground up. You’ll focus on our learning platform and the applications that support it, serving multiple audiences both within and beyond Alpha.
Consider a five‑year‑old who hasn’t learned to read yet, discovering numbers through an interface that must make exploration feel effortless. Think about a teenager working two grade levels below their age, rebuilding trust after repeated academic setbacks—one unclear interaction could undo that progress. Picture a parent finally understanding their child’s learning journey; that transparency reduces stress and turns them into an active partner. An academic coach overseeing students of varied ages needs visibility into progress without information overload. Your role demands understanding each user deeply enough to design meaningfully different experiences for each.
You own the experience layer: conduct thorough research into each audience, translate findings into design principles engineers can implement directly, and deliver code‑ready outputs that ship immediately rather than static deliverables that stall in feedback loops. You’ll collaborate with product leaders accountable for results and engineers who deploy production code. When a request compromises user experience, you challenge it. The responsibility is yours, start to finish.
AI becomes your force multiplier for faster iteration and broader coverage, but your design judgment—not algorithmic suggestions—determines what reaches users. Primary focus remains our education platform, with intermittent work in other areas.
What You Will Be Doing
- Conduct user research across fundamentally different audience segments and develop design principles that reflect that understanding.
- Establish and maintain design systems within each product’s native UI framework, enabling engineering velocity and preventing design fragmentation.
- Develop functional prototypes that allow product leaders to validate decisions in days rather than weeks.
- Evaluate existing products through the user lens: identify experience breakdowns, diagnose engagement barriers, and determine high‑impact improvements.
- Establish design culture: set expectations for feedback, articulate trade‑off evaluation methods, and determine which standards are non‑negotiable.
- Collaborate with product leaders and engineering teams, challenging requests that degrade user experience.
What You Won’t Be Doing
- Setting product strategy; product leaders own strategic direction, you ensure experience aligns with it.
- Creating static mockups requiring engineering translation.
- Focusing on a single product; your scope spans the entire portfolio.
- Waiting for complete design briefs; you synthesize context from fragmented inputs and begin designing with partial information.
- Requesting approval to act; you possess authority to surface and resolve UX issues independently.
Basic Requirements
- Minimum 5 years in product design or UX positions, with complete ownership spanning research through production deployment.
- Clear evidence of user empathy and research rigor with audiences substantially different from yourself.
- Demonstrated design excellence in interaction and visual domains, with portfolio work showing audience‑tailored decisions over template solutions, combined with articulated design convictions.
- Proven AI‑native approach: rapid iteration capability, critical evaluation skills, and willingness to challenge initial AI‑generated output instead of defaulting to it.
- Capability to convert designs into functional code leveraging AI tools and contemporary frameworks.
- Experience establishing a design function and culture from inception, not joining existing structures.
About LearnWithAI
LearnWithAI is an edtech startup that leverages AI and subject matter experts to cultivate a new way of learning. Our unique approach combines more than 50 years of learning science, cutting‑edge data analytics, and AI‑powered coaching, enabling students to learn more, learn faster, and learn better while having fun.
Compensation & Benefits
This is a full‑time (40 hours per week) position. The compensation level for this role is $100 USD per hour, which equates to $200,000 USD per year assuming 40 hours per week and 50 weeks per year. Payment is weekly.
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