As the Director of Product Design, you will lead this transformation across both the customer journey and the learning experience. You'll shape how families discover and choose AoPS and how students engage with and progress through our curriculum. You will also play a key role in translating our evolving brand identity into product, ensuring it is not just expressed visually, but meaningfully embedded in how our products feel, function, and support learning.
This is a hands-on leadership role. We're looking for a player-coach who can set direction, elevate design quality, and actively engage in design team work through critique and mentorship, design workshops, and exploration of new tools and technologies that improve how we build.
The Director of Product Design will:- Set and drive the design vision for a cohesive end-to-end experience across discovery, enrollment, and learning, unifying fragmented products and journeys into a clear, connected system
- Translate AoPS's evolving brand identity into product experiences, ensuring it is reflected in how our products work, feel, and support learning
- Shape how Product, Design, and Engineering work together, evolving team workflows and adopting modern tools (including AI) to improve speed, quality, and collaboration
- Partner closely with Academics teams to ensure pedagogy meaningfully informs the design of learning experiences
- Establish and scale design systems, standards, and practices that enable consistency, quality, and velocity across teams
- Build and lead a strong design function by hiring, mentoring, and developing designers, and fostering a culture of thoughtful critique, high standards, and continuous improvement
- Elevate how we learn from users, strengthening research practices and embedding continuous learning and iteration into how teams operate
- Stay close enough to the work to provide clear, actionable design direction, stepping in on high-impact problems when needed
The ideal candidate has:- Strong product design experience (~8+ years) with a track record of shipping high-quality, user-centered products
- Experience leading or mentoring designers, with a player-coach mindset
- Ability to operate across levels, from systems thinking and strategy to interaction and visual design details
- Experience working in both structured and fast-moving environments
- Strong design judgment and ability to give clear, actionable critique
- Experience building or contributing to design systems at scale
- Experience incorporating user insights and data into product and design decisions, and building a culture of continuous learning and evidence-based decision-making
- Ability to translate brand principles into product experiences (not just visual design)
- Interest in and openness to emerging tools and technologies (including AI) and how they can improve team effectiveness
- Excellent collaboration skills across Product, Engineering, and cross-functional partners
- Strong alignment with AoPS's mission and a genuine interest in how students learn, persist through challenge, and develop deep problem-solving skills
- Preferred: Experience designing learning experiences or products for students, teachers, or educational contexts
Why Join AoPS: This is a hybrid full-time position based at our headquarters in San Diego, CA. The full salary range for this position is 170k-210k with a variable year-end bonus. Here are some things you can look forward to:
- Impact: As Director of Product Design, you will lead the transformation of how hundreds of thousands of students and families experience AoPS, shaping a unified journey that makes world-class problem-solving education more discoverable, engaging, and effective
- Flexibility: Casual work environment with a hybrid work week and flexible scheduling
- Benefits: Multiple options for Medical, Dental and Vision plans
- Future Planning: 401(k) with company match
- Quality of Life: PTO Plan and supportive leadership that gives you the work-life balance you deserve
- Ease of Transition: Relocation bonus (if currently located outside of San Diego)
