We’re hiring a senior visual & UX designer at Khan Academy
Greetings! 🖖🏼✨
We’re looking for a talented designer interested in joining our 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 non-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
- Work with teams across the organization to craft high quality, meaningful, engaging experiences across brand, visual language, marketing and philanthropy campaigns.
- Collaborate with other designers, brand thinkers, and storytellers to help us evolve our visual language and user experience, and their relationship to the company’s mission.
- Offer strategic guidance on how to incorporate engaging visual language into effective user experiences.
- Provide thoughtful feedback and art direction to internal and external illustrators & designers.
- Educate and advocate for design and conceptual cohesiveness across brand, marketing, product, and content.
- Identify and evangelize for injecting moments of joy into our communications, culture and product.
- Create design style guides and document best practices.
- Evaluate our current platform and communications surface area and identify opportunities to improve user experiences, meet strategic goals, and boost learning mindset.
- Facilitate workshops and conversations that help other teams incorporate visual and emotional design.
- Autonomously decide how to approach a design problem and organize your own work.
- Move between creating rough sketches to high-quality drawings to communicate your solutions. Use user research and data to inform your style and reasoning.
- Present to and incorporate feedback from stakeholders from Product Design, Engineering, Product, and Brand.
You may be a good fit if
- You have 5+ years experience in the design industry (ideally experience in both interaction design and visual design) or comparable experience.
- Strong visual eye/sensibility.
- Ability to balance individual design work with strategic thinking and developing broader visual & brand systems.
- A rich and diverse portfolio showing evidence of different types of projects, visual maturity, and attention to nuance.
- Ability to work with a low-ego, highly collaborative, cross-functional team.
- A deep curiosity about how and why people learn — and how they respond to visual and emotional cues.
- High comfort level in working within a self-directed culture and navigating ambiguity.
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 Media, Inc), 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 remote-friendly way.
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.
