Senior Product Designer

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

The Explore product design language:

• Own the design system and pattern library that Explore's product surfaces are built on, and keep it current as the product evolves.
• Define interaction models for genuinely new problems: AI-driven outreach and intelligence tooling that does not have an obvious off-the-shelf pattern to borrow from.
• Translate what works in Cialfo's and BridgeU's counselor-facing experience into what a university-facing AI platform actually needs.

Product delivery, end to end:

• Partner with product managers and engineers from early concept through shipped code on every major release, not just at the handoff points.
• Turn ambiguous hypotheses about what universities need into concrete, testable product experiences.
• Ensure design decisions are documented well enough that engineering can build against them with minimal back-and-forth.

Research and validation:

• Run evaluative research and usability testing to pressure-test problem definitions before they become roadmap commitments.
• Build the case for design decisions using evidence, not instinct alone, and be ready to defend that case in front of product and engineering leadership.

Design culture and mentorship:

• Coach and mentor other designers on the team, raising the bar for craft across the function, not just within your own projects.
• Advocate for user-centered design inside and outside the Explore team, including with stakeholders who are not naturally design-literate.

Requirements:

• You've spent the better part of five years as a product designer, and you've built more than one tech product, mobile and desktop, from something close to a blank page rather than only refining what already existed. You know the difference between those two kinds of work, and you've chosen, more than once, to do the harder one.
• Your commercial and product instinct is sharp enough that you don't need someone else to translate a business problem into a design problem for you. Given a rough hypothesis and a real user pain point, you can turn it into wireframes, flows, and a testable prototype without waiting for a fully specified brief, and you're just as comfortable running the usability testing that tells you whether your first instinct was actually right.
• You're genuinely fluent in the craft: you understand usability principles and human-computer interaction deeply enough to defend a design decision on its merits, not just on taste, and your visual design work reflects real sensitivity to how a system and a user actually interact, not just how a screen looks in isolation. Some working knowledge of front-end implementation (HTML, SASS, CSS, and React) helps you have sharper conversations with engineering, even if it isn't the core of the job.
• You've mentored other designers before, and you think of that as part of the craft, not a distraction from it. You read pushback from a product manager or an engineer not as an obstacle but as a normal part of getting to the right answer, and you can hold your ground on a design decision while still being genuinely open to being wrong.
• Somewhere underneath the craft and the process, you care about who's actually on the other end of the interface: a counselor trying to make a good call under pressure, a student trying to understand an unfamiliar system, or a university team trying to trust a recommendation enough to act on it.
• Most importantly, you read the description of what Explore is building, and your first reaction was not "this sounds like a good design job. " It was closer to the system not existing yet, and I know how to build the right one. That's the person this role is for.