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Senior Product Designer (Design Lead)

UPchieve is hiring!

About

UPchieve is an edtech nonprofit that provides free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling to low-income students nationwide. Using our app, students can request and get paired with a live, volunteer tutor in under 5 minutes. Our mission is to close the college enrollment gap between low- and high-income students so that all students have an equal opportunity to achieve upward mobility. We’ve matched 350,000+ requests from 50,000+ students across all 50 states. Our work has also been recognized by Forbes and TIME, and our funders include both Y Combinator and the Gates Foundation. Watch this video to see our impact on students.

Who we’re looking for
We’re a small team taking on the monumental challenge of democratizing access to academic support. That means we need team members who are excited by autonomy and willing to work on projects outside the scope of their job description if needed. We also look for candidates who have a personal connection to our cause or a demonstrable interest in education or serving low-income populations.

Our team

  • We’re a remote-first team located across the U.S.
  • We highly value diversity of experiences & perspectives. The majority of the team are people of color, and many of us have experience growing up low-income or navigating nontraditional educational pathways
  • We believe working full-time means 40 hrs/wk. Non-work stuff is important too!
  • We get together in person 2x/year to foster connection as a remote team: Once for an all-staff retreat, and once for a department offsite.

Our benefits

  • 3 weeks paid vacation AND 20+ paid holidays (including Dec 24-Jan 1)
  • Flexible work schedule (choose your own hours)
  • $1000/year professional development stipend
  • $1000/year remote work stipend
  • Free health insurance for employees AND their families
  • 401ks with a 6% employer contribution
  • Half-day fridays half the year

Job Description

This is a remote position.

Join our product team to help us provide free tutoring to 8 million low-income high school students in the U.S by 2030.

We're looking for our first dedicated software product designer who can help us win with design. UPchieve has served students and volunteers directly since day one, so we've built products our users want to use out of necessity! As we ship faster and partner with more schools, we need someone to turn our lead in design into a victory in delight. That's you. You'll surprise users with effortless clicks that just work and just get them. Expect to spend most of your 40 hours a week understanding users, coaching teams on design, testing, and shipping. Optional, but a bonus: we're also on the lookout for a design engineer 🦄 who can dust off those frontend skills every so often to push their vision to the users themselves.

Given our early stage, you'll shape both our product's direction and team's culture. Think startup energy, nonprofit purpose. Come put your name on every corner of the world's best tutoring platform for low-income students!

This might be the right job for you if...

  • Our mission is personal, and you'd chase it elsewhere if not here.

  • You've got range. Visual design, quant UX, UXR, IxD, Jurassic period historical reenactments... you've dabbled.

  • You're all about outcomes. Delight is something you can define, measure, and drive, mixing art and science to make magic.

  • You're scrappy. You dig in and figure it out with what you've got. You've been prone to say, "Why couldn't we do this faster this way?"

What you'll do

  • Own the design KPIs rolling up to your north star "delight:" that joyful surprise when an experience blows past your expectations.

  • Get in people's heads. You'll talk to users, watch them, study them, and whatever else helps you become the authority on and architect of their mental models.

  • Work shoulder-to-shoulder with 2 small product teams, offering ideas in discovery and designs in delivery. Full transparency: you'll be the first, sole product designer shared across teams. This is tough!

  • Hold the whole experience in your hands 🤲 You'll capture the cross-team view of the user experience, craft a vision for delightful journeys throughout our product suite, and partner with teams to bring that vision to life.

  • Monitor our critical, high-traffic user flows and clean up "design bugs"

  • Raise the design bar across the company. You'll coach others in design thinking whenever you can and support great design through our design system, (🤞) UI component library, and other scaffolds you dream up.

Preferred Experience

Here are some experiences we think would make a 🌟 candidate, but they aren't the only things that could do that. You don't need to check all the boxes to apply.

  • Has 5+ years of software product design experience, including UX/UI or service design

  • Thrived in a startup environment with minimal structure

  • Worked embedded within product and engineering teams, shipping real products (ideally education technology or marketplace products)

  • Has experience with human-centered design methods and usability testing

  • Has experience with or strong interest in cognitive psychology, learning science, or human-computer interaction

  • Worked at a Title I high school or otherwise has first-hand experience with the life of a low-income student

  • Built and maintained a design system for a suite of related products

  • Has enough frontend skill (with AI assistance) to maintain a component library (or the willingness to learn!)

Recruitment Process

Thank you for considering us! We appreciate the effort you’re investing. Unfortunately, due to the volume of applications we get, it can take us a few weeks from when you submit your application to invite you to a screening call. We can typically only bring the top ~15 candidates forward to screening calls; for some roles that is less than 10% of applicants. While we do our best, due to the volume of applications we get, we can’t promise a response to every application.

(Pro tip: real humans do review your application! So, while it's probably a good idea to optimize your resume for some AI in a giant company's ATS, here it's better to optimize your resume for the hiring manager Chris.)

Our hiring process has 4 stages. We aim for each stage to take roughly a week.

  1. Screener: A short call to learn about each other and check mutual fit.

  2. Portfolio review: We'll look at your work for range, outcomes, and how you think.

  3. Interviews: Tell us about a project you're proud of, and meet some of the team.

  4. Day in the life: Spend a few hours designing with us as part of a product trio (designer + PM + engineer). It's the best way for both sides to feel what working together is actually like.

U.S. work authorization

Right now, our small mighty team is focusing on candidates who are already authorized to work in the U.S. We're not set up to sponsor visas or handle immigration procedures at the moment. It's a tough call, and we're aiming to expand our capabilities in the future. If you're ready to work in the U.S., we'd love to connect with you!

Equal opportunity employer

Given our mission, it's probably no surprise we're big believers in equal opportunities for everyone. We're committed to creating a workplace that's as diverse as the students we serve. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, we comply with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all team members.

Additional Information

  • Contract Type: Full-Time
  • Location: Brooklyn
  • Experience: > 5 years
  • Possible full remote
  • Salary: between 123000$ and 150000$ / year
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