Staff Product Designer, Education

Learning Commons aims to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner by building AI infrastructure that better connects the way students learn to the tools they learn with.

The Team

At Learning Commons, we pair technology with grantmaking to scale proven teaching and learning practices to benefit every learner. We aim to translate what learning science tells us about how students learn best into classroom practice. With the advent of generative AI, that translation work can be accelerated and scaled to have a greater impact.

Our mission is to bring learning science into the tools used every day by teachers and students, ensuring that technology reflects the realities of classrooms and strengthens teaching and learning.

In today's fragmented edtech landscape, school districts are often left piecing together products that don't always align with curricula or instructional needs. While AI holds enormous potential to support educators, it can only deliver on that promise when grounded in research, high-quality educational data, and expert evaluation. That's why we're building open, public-purpose infrastructure — datasets, rubrics, and resources — that help raise the standard for educational tools and create more consistent, impactful learning experiences for all students and teachers.

The Opportunity

We've built the foundation: Learning Commons offers a Knowledge Graph of academic standards and learning components, Evaluators for measuring model quality in educational contexts, and Agent Skills: real infrastructure that partners like Canva, Diffit, and Playlab build on. Developers can find us, sign up, get a key, and make their first call.

The next phase is about what they do with it: This Staff Product Design role owns developer experience end to end: improving conversion from interest to integration, improving onboarding, evolving the dataset catalog, determining what developers need to see about their own integrations, and evolving the interactive experiences that let people try our products before they commit.

You would set that direction rather than inherit it. That means building the point of view on what drives sustained use, then building the product: developer integration flows, a platform that reads as one coherent system rather than four, and a clear access system that runs underneath.

The intersection is rare. Philanthropic funding means we optimize for developer and educator outcomes rather than conversion metrics, the audience is  technical, and the education sector is at an inflection point on what AI should be allowed to do in a classroom.

What You'll Do

• Own developer experience end to end. Build and hold the point of view on what drives sustained use of Learning Commons tools, through research, usage data and direct partner contact, and turn it into a roadmap the organization aligns behind.
• Design developer integration views from zero. Give developers visibility into how their integrations are performing: usage, quality, errors, impact. There's no prior art here internally, so you'd define what it is.
• Make the platform read as one product. Lead the systematic design work across platform, catalog, docs and marketing surfaces, setting patterns and information architecture rather than applying them.
• Extend the dataset catalog and access experience. Build on what's shipped: new features, richer discovery, and the permission and organization models underneath.
• Set the craft bar and raise it in others. Partner closely with our design systems lead, mentor designers across the team, and be a reviewer people seek out.

What You'll Bring

• At minimum 8 years of professional experience.
• Visual craft paired with product thinking. This role sets the quality bar for the team. Strength in visual and interaction design, and the desire to bring brand expression into the product, are both required.
• You close the loop with design systems. Your recommendations land in the system rather than staying one-off. You partner with our systems designer to get patterns adopted, not just proposed.
• A strategist, not just a maker. You've owned an entire product or platform in production and set its direction. You frame ambiguous problems, make explicit value and risk tradeoffs, and bring people with you rather than waiting for a fully specified brief.
• Strong systems instincts and technical depth. Permissions, organization models and multi-surface navigation read as interesting problems to you. You can read an API reference, hold your own with engineers about what's feasible, and design within real constraints rather than around them.
• Comfort with new ways of working. You use AI-native methods to ship fast and learn, rather than running a linear ideate, research, build, ship cycle. We prototype in code and validate early.

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $170,000.00-$235,400. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process. 

This position may be eligible to participate in our discretionary annual performance bonus program. Bonus eligibility and targets are determined in accordance with our total rewards philosophy and may vary by role.

Better Together

As we grow, we’re excited to strengthen in-person connections and cultivate a collaborative, team-oriented environment. This role is a hybrid position requiring you to be onsite for at least 60% of the working month, approximately 3 days a week, with specific in-office days determined by the team’s manager. The exact schedule will be at the hiring manager's discretion and communicated during the interview process.

Benefits for the Whole You 

We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible. 

• Provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
• Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice. 
• Funding for select family-forming benefits. 
• Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving

If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.

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