Senior Product Designer (Travel)

Hi, I’m JC, Head of Design at Zen Educate. I started sketching out the first versions of the product on evenings and weekends before we had a team, a logo, or an office. Now, I lead our growing design function as we tackle more complex, ambitious, and impactful problems across both sides of the Atlantic.

I’m looking for a Senior Product Designer who wants to do meaningful work at the intersection of service, system, and interface design. Someone who cares deeply about users, communicates clearly, thinks in flows not screens, and is excited to partner closely with product, engineering, our commercial team and most importantly, our customers, to solve real-world problems in education.

Design at Zen is about shaping problems, navigating ambiguity, collaborating with conviction — and crafting simple, scalable, elegant experiences that make a real difference.

• Craft + impact – quality design isn’t precious, it’s purposeful
• Bias to ship – perfection is a direction, not a requirement
• Curiosity and candour – great design comes from great questions and honest collaboration

We’re still a small design team, which means you’ll have a lot of room to shape how we work, build design maturity across the org, and leave your fingerprints on a product with deep real-world impact.

What we are building and why: Getting the right teacher into the right school at the right time is a nuanced, meaningful problem. Done well, it improves children’s outcomes and gets more money into classrooms (we’ve already saved UK schools over £30 million since 2017). Done poorly, it burns out teachers, wastes money, and disrupts education.

Our platform helps teachers find meaningful work and schools fill roles efficiently. It supports internal operations teams matching supply and demand, mobile-first experiences for educators, and tools for schools to manage short- and long-term needs.

That means complex, fascinating design challenges at every level: workflow UX, service design, visual systems, information architecture, messaging, accessibility, trust, and much more.

You get to be involved in the whole design process from helping to define what you'll work on, to delivery — it's very collaborative. Some highlights that I'm working on would be: a design-led project to improve the teacher request flow, and helping refine the brand as we grow.

You’ll work across the full product lifecycle — from discovery through to delivery — with a focus on user outcomes, speed of learning, and design quality. You’ll also mentor other designers, contribute to evolving our design culture, and help shape how we scale.

Here’s some context to help you decide if Zen is a good fit:

• Design is a partner, not a service.
• Design system exists and is growing. But you’ll help define and evolve it — it’s not “done” or rigid.

Compensation: Solid, but not flashy compensation. Pay increases come with increased level and scope. Small design team, big ambitions. You won’t get lost in a 50-person design org — and you’ll help define what “great” looks like.

Iterative sharing, with structured rituals and casual touch points to stay aligned and connected. If you like clean chaos and building things properly, you’ll thrive.

We aim to hire fast and fairly — clarity over games.

Recruiter chat: We’ll check the basics — your availability, compensation expectations, and whether this feels like a mutual fit. I’ll want to understand how you work, what matters to you in a design role, and how we can support your best work. A deep dive into a past project (or two) will follow. We’ll look for clear storytelling, design thinking, collaboration, and the impact of your work.

Design task session, Culture & collaboration chat: Expect a relaxed, candid chat about team dynamics, values, and ways of working. If you skimmed and thought “maybe,” apply anyway — you’ll get a clearer sense once we chat.

We currently have a clear need for one more Senior Product Designer to join the team — maybe it’s you?

Diversity and Inclusion: At Zen, we strive to build a culture of equity and inclusion, where everyone is respected, valued and appreciated for their unique traits, experiences and perspectives. We are committed to creating a safe, inclusive and equitable environment where our team can thrive, regardless of age, ethnicity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, disability, religion or beliefs. We value our differences and believe that practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion help us create a fairer, more compassionate environment for all.

We welcome applicants with diverse backgrounds and different experiences and perspectives — just like the staff who teach through Zen and the children at the schools we work with. We are committed to building a team that reflects the diversity of our community and promoting an equitable and inclusive environment for all.