Principal UX Designer

About the role

Join Zearn, a leading educational technology company, as a Principal UX Designer. In this role, you will lead the strategic design for our Educator app onboarding experience, directly impacting how thousands of teachers adopt Zearn to help all students learn and love math. You will own the end-to-end design strategy for high-leverage educator onboarding and engagement experiences, conduct strategic user research, and drive design excellence across the organization. This is an opportunity to make a significant impact on education and help shape the future of math learning. Key missions: Lead the strategic design for the Educator app onboarding experience, transforming ambiguous challenges into clear, intuitive experiences.. Own the end-to-end design strategy for high-leverage educator onboarding and engagement experiences, delivering complete, high-impact UX projects.. Conduct user research, usability testing, and competitive analysis to uncover deep insights, translating findings into strategic design decisions. Profile: - Rapid, High-Quality Execution and Systems Thinking: You move quickly from concept to prototype without sacrificing quality, maintaining an exceptional bar for craft, while meeting aggressive timelines in a fast-paced environment - The Craft of Simplifying Complexity: You excel at taking complex systems, sophisticated content, and ambiguous requirements, gaining a deep understanding, and distilling them into elegant, intuitive experiences that users can immediately understand and act upon - Cross-functional Influence and Alignment: You build strong relationships across Product, Engineering, and Leadership, creating alignment through clear communication, compelling storytelling, and collaborative problem-solving that brings others along on the strategic journey - Strategic Research and Insight Generation: You conduct comprehensive user research, usability testing, and competitive analysis that uncovers deep insights, then translate those findings into strategic design decisions and product recommendations that influence the entire product roadmap - Expertise in Onboarding and Engagement: You understand the unique challenges of onboarding design, reducing time-to-value, building confidence, and creating habit formation, and have experience designing customer journeys that drive sustained engagement - Mastery of end-to-end Design Leadership: You own major initiatives from research through implementation, orchestrating all aspects of the design process to deliver transformational user experiences and set the standard for the team - A proven track record of conducting user research, usability testing, and competitive analysis that directly informed and changed strategic product decisions - Experience designing for educators, complex enterprise users, or other audiences who need to understand sophisticated systems quickly - Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguous problem spaces and turn complexity into simple, intuitive user experiences - Evidence of influencing a design team's craft and process, such as contributing to or advocating for a design system, templates, or libraries - Deep passion for educational technology and math, with a commitment to helping all students succeed - Highly refined active listening skills, in addition to excellent verbal and written communication skills - Advanced prototyping skills enabling rapid iteration and high-fidelity demonstrations - A portfolio demonstrating exceptional quality and experience leading major end-to-end UX/Product design initiatives, ideally including examples of onboarding or engagement-focused projects - 10+ years as a professional UX Designer with demonstrated progression to senior individual contributor roles