We’re hiring a senior UX writer at Khan Academy

Erica Deahl
Khan Academy Design
5 min readFeb 24, 2020

--

Hello there! 👋🏾

We’re looking for a UX writer interested in joining our design team and applying their skills 🧠✏️ in service of a more just and equitable world ✊🏽.

At Khan Academy, our mission is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere 🌍🌏🌎. We approach it with a spirit of humility and thoughtfulness about how technology is best positioned to help.

Khan Academy is a not-for-profit, and our funders care just as much as we do about our positive impact, efficacy, and leveling the playing field in education.

You’ll work on

  • Strategically defining and shaping the voices of the products we develop and establishing UX writing consistency across brand and product.
  • Crafting clear and user-centric UX writing for key initiatives that serve a wide range of audiences.
  • Conducting research to assess clarity and effectiveness of UX writing with teachers and students.
  • Evangelizing UX writing across the organization.
  • Identifying and prioritizing opportunities to use UX writing to improve user experiences and meet strategic goals.
  • Leading workshops and conversations to help teams design with language.
  • Partnering with design, engineering, marketing, research, product management, and other collaborators to create language, toolkits, templates and systems that help us deliver “wow” at scale.

You may be a good fit if

  • You have a strong UX writing portfolio, deep experience in UX writing or another relevant product writing field, and experience shipping products and collaborating with a cross-functional product team.
  • You’re comfortable writing for a diverse, global audience including adults and kids of all ages.
  • You have experience guiding product teams in UX writing best practices; creating lightweight, highly collaborative processes; and creating toolkits, templates, and systems to help others improve their writing.
  • You’re able to balance individual contributor work with big picture strategic thinking.
  • You’re introspective, mature, and have excellent communication skills. You can demonstrate that you’re invested in collaborating with peers and stakeholders across design, engineering, marketing, research, and product.
  • You have a high comfort level working within a self-directed culture, solving complex problems, and navigating ambiguity.
  • You’re passionate about education and designing engaging learning experiences, and you’re deeply curious about how and why people learn.
  • You’re available to work at least 3 days per week onsite at our Mountain View, CA office.
Khan Academy team conducting field research in Brazil, 2019

Our benefits

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well!

  • 💸 Highly competitive salaries and annual bonuses
  • 🏖 Flexible work and time-off schedules and ample paid time off as needed — we are about getting things done, not face time
  • 👶🏽 Generous parental leave
  • 🍱 Catered lunch daily plus lots of snacks and beverages
  • 🚆 Great location: short walking distance to Caltrain and downtown Mountain View. We have a preference for this candidate to work from our office in Mountain View, CA; but for the right candidate and fit, we are open to remote arrangements.
  • 🎓 The opportunity to even the playing field and put your talents toward a deeply meaningful mission
  • 🌈 Affinity groups where parents, Black and Latinx, women and gender minorities, and LGBT+ identified folks support one another
  • 🏥 Oh, and we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) with 4% matching, and comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life

About our team

The team at Khan Academy comes from a wide variety of backgrounds, and we actively foster a cross-disciplinary environment because we believe that’s where the magic happens. Khan Academy currently employs around 200 full time staff, including the creators of our educational content, who come from teaching backgrounds.

The design team is a small, highly diverse group of people responsible for UX research, brand and marketing design, product design, and UX writing. Each member has a lot of impact and makes huge contributions across the board. There are currently 15 people on the team, from a wide variety of backgrounds: media (Vox), civics (18F), consumer (Square, NerdWallet, Facebook), enterprise (IBM), service (Starbucks) and the agency world (frog design, 2x4, Instrument). About half of the team is based in the Bay Area, and half is distributed across California, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, and New York — so we operate in a creatively distributed-friendly way.

The design team 💖

Want to know more about us?

Our company values

👩🏾‍🎓 Live & breathe learners
We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

✊🏽 Take a stand
As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

💪🏽 Embrace diverse perspectives
We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

🏃🏽 Work responsibly and sustainably
We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

💖 Bring out the joy
We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

🧠 Cultivate learning mindset
We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don’t let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow
We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

Apply here!

Senior UX writer

--

--