The posting
ABOUT PLAYLAB
Playlab is a nonprofit building public infrastructure for educational AI: enabling a global community to create AI tools that reflect their needs and values. We equip communities with AI tools and hands-on professional development that empowers educators and students to build custom AI apps for their unique context. Over 60,000 educators have published apps on Playlab, and the impact is growing every day.
If you're passionate about building creative, equitable futures for students and teachers, we hope you'll join us.
THE ROLE
At Playlab, we believe that AI is a new design material, one that should be shaped by many.
The next decade of education will be defined by who gets to design how intelligent systems are developed for and deployed in education. Most AI products cast teachers and students as end users, receiving outputs from a system that's designed for them. We're building an alternative: educators as the designers of AI systems, and of how they and their students interact with them. Your role is to help invent this in deep partnership with our community.
At Playlab, designers are responsible, first, for researching, experimenting with, and implementing interaction patterns that empower educators to be makers of technology. Designers also help shape how educators learn about AI and grow their confidence to tinker with it in Playlab. Lastly, designers shape the storytelling that carries Playlab’s work into the world.
At any given time, you’ll be examining (a) how might we expand and deepen what educators can create with AI? (b) how might we lower the floor for who can create and how easy it is to meaningfully deploy AI systems in real educational contexts?
You’ll do this at a nonprofit that culturally sits between a startup and R&D lab:
- As a non-profit, we’re deeply committed to interrogating AI and are the biggest critics of our own work. Our governance keeps our incentives aligned with improving teaching and learning, not growth for its own sake.
- As a startup, we believe in designing under the actual conditions in which educators and learners will interact with AI, and in shipping value to them every day.
- As an R&D lab, we work on unsolved, longer-horizon problems, and treat our own product as an ongoing experiment.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
As Senior Product Designer, you'll own the design of Playlab surfaces, from prototype through shipped product.
- Craft: Your work has a clear point of view, is pertinent, and production-grade. You have good instincts for when to ship fast to keep us learning, and when to slow down for things that need more care.
- Product sense: You form well-reasoned points of view on core product questions because you stay close to the problems Playlab is solving, and you bring that perspective into decisions about the work you own. You can hold unresolved questions and keep moving through the ambiguity.
- Initiative: Given a fuzzy goal or problem, you can define the design space, gather the right context, and drive it through prototyping and iteration to a shipped solution. You think ahead of dependencies, edge cases, and second-order questions. You proactively bring leadership along to validate decisions as you build.
- Technical fluency: You build with and on AI. You have enough technical understanding to judge what's worth building. You stay current with where AI is heading and build or curate custom tooling to work faster.
- Taste: You have a clear, articulable point of view on what makes something good across visual, interaction, and communication design, including the restraint to know when a rough edge serves the work better.
YOU ARE A FIT IF ...
1. You have at least 5 years of experience as a strong design generalist with a home base in product design and a track record in one or more other design disciplines.
2. You can lead design on the projects you own while collaborating closely across the team.
3. You have broad knowledge of creative tools and workflows, including the ones that leverage AI, and you build or curate tooling to speed up your own work.
4. You care about learning and enjoy spending time in learning environments and with the people who create them (teachers, students, school leaders, etc.).
5. You find joy in getting technical and working with engineers. You might even push some code yourself.
BONUS POINTS FOR...
- Experience in education or building in edtech
- Experience with designing creative tech
- A love for creative side quests
NOTE
We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every qualification listed in this job post. Research shows that people from underrepresented groups are more likely to experience imposter syndrome and to doubt the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to count yourself out. We're building toward equitable futures where AI reflects the full range of people who learn and teach with it. We hold ourselves to that same standard in who we bring onto the team. If this work speaks to you, we'd like to hear from you.
