Design LeadDepartment: Product Management
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Remote - USA
Reporting To: Director of Product Design
DescriptionAs a
Design Lead, you own the user experience for your product area and co-steward our shared design system, while staying hands-on in Figma every day. This is a player-coach role: you will design, lead our design efforts, and partner closely with Product Managers as a trusted consultant, helping bridge the gap between our design and product teams to ensure cohesive, high-quality outcomes.
Key Responsibilities- Maintain and evolve the Summit K12 design system - components, patterns, typography, color, accessibility standards, and interaction behaviors
- Keep the system documented, versioned, and genuinely used, so teams move faster with it than without it
- Partner with Engineering to ensure components are technically feasible and consistently implemented
- Drive adoption - you and your fellow Design Leads share accountability for the system actually being used across teams, reducing UX fragmentation through enablement and reusable patterns rather than policing
- Decide, jointly with your fellow Design Leads, what enters the system and when projects in your area can deviate from it, escalating consequential additions, cross-product deviations, and any calls the leads can't align on.
- Act as a design consultant and force multiplier to Product Managers - in a world where a PM can spin up an AI prototype in an afternoon, you're the one who makes it shippable: coherent, accessible, and on-system
- Engage early in discovery to shape solutions, not just review them at the end
- Make the case for design through outcomes - demonstrate how strong UX reduces rework, support burden, and churn
- Be the Design Lead your teams trust for day-to-day design calls
- Spend real time in Figma - this is a shipping role, not a pure oversight role
- Translate platform experience strategy into concrete, consistent navigation, workflows, and interaction patterns across all user types
- Leverage AI tools (e.g., Claude, v0, Figma AI) to accelerate design and development workflows
- Integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles into the design system so interaction patterns work for the full range of learner abilities
- Use lightweight validation - heuristic reviews, quick user feedback loops, analytics, and support signals - in place of heavyweight research studies
- Know when a decision needs evidence and when experienced judgment is enough
- Advocate for accessibility, clarity, and simplicity in every experience
- Set clear expectations for quality, ownership, and accountability
- Run lean design workflows in Figma and Jira that support fast iteration and predictable delivery
- Foster a culture of user empathy, experimentation, and low-ego collaboration
- Lead, mentor and develop the designers you work with
Skills, Knowledge and ExpertiseRequired- 6+ years in product/UX design, including owning a design system
- Experience leading or mentoring designers while staying hands-on
- Fluency in Figma and comfort managing design work in Jira
- Active use of AI tools in your design workflow, and enthusiasm for operating as an AI-leveraged, lean design function
- Strong grounding in user-centered design, interaction design, and Universal Design for Learning
- Experience with WCAG accessibility standards, including interpreting ACRs and driving remediation
- A track record of building design cohesion through cross-functional partnership - influence earned, not imposed
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment: shipping without waiting for perfect data, with limited resources and tight timelines
- EdTech experience, or deep accessibility/UDL work that translates quickly to K-12 contexts
- Experience designing SaaS or platform-based products
- Understanding of the workflows and daily realities of teachers, school administrators, and district leaders
- Experience collaborating with distributed or global teams across time zones
- Experience in lean or scaling organizations
- A single, consistently applied design system across all products
- Product Managers seek out design partnership because it makes their features better and faster to ship
- Reduced UX inconsistency and rework during development
- Faster delivery through reusable patterns and clear standards
- Positive usability feedback from teachers, students, and administrators
BenefitsSummit K12 offers a comprehensive benefits package. Highlights include:
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with multiple plan options
- Company-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Paid Time Off (PTO) program
- 10 paid holidays plus 1 floating holiday annually
- Wellness resources and support programs
