Creative Design Lead - Marketing

Job Description Description Summit K12 is building a lean, modern design function — and you'll be at the center of it. As a Design Lead , you own the user experience for your product area and co-steward our shared design system, while staying hands-on in Figma every day. This is a player-coach role: you will design, lead our design efforts, and partner closely with Product Managers as a trusted consultant, helping bridge the gap between our design and product teams to ensure cohesive, high-quality outcomes.
We're a customer-driven, growing company — many of us came from the classrooms and districts we serve, so deep user knowledge lives in-house. We're looking for someone who ships confidently without waiting for perfect data, uses AI tools to multiply their output, and earns influence through craft and judgment rather than title or process.
Responsibilities

Maintain and evolve the Summit K12 design system — components, patterns, typography, color, accessibility standards, and interaction behaviors
Keep the system documented, versioned, and genuinely used, so teams move faster with it than without it
Drive adoption — you and your fellow Design Leads share accountability for the system actually being used across teams, reducing UX fragmentation through enablement and reusable patterns rather than policing
Decide, jointly with your fellow Design Leads, what enters the system and when projects in your area can deviate from it, escalating consequential additions, cross-product deviations, and any calls the leads can't align on.
Act as a design consultant and force multiplier to Product Managers — in a world where a PM can spin up an AI prototype in an afternoon, you're the one who makes it shippable: coherent, accessible, and on-system
Make the case for design through outcomes — demonstrate how strong UX reduces rework, support burden, and churn
Be the Design Lead your teams trust for day-to-day design calls
Spend real time in Figma — this is a shipping role, not a pure oversight role
Translate platform experience strategy into concrete, consistent navigation, workflows, and interaction patterns across all user types
Claude, v0, Figma AI) to accelerate design and development workflows
Integrate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles into the design system so interaction patterns work for the full range of learner abilities
Set clear expectations for quality, ownership, and accountability
Run lean design workflows in Figma and Jira that support fast iteration and predictable delivery
Qualifications

6+ years in product/UX design, including owning a design system
~ Fluency in Figma and comfort managing design work in Jira
~ Active use of AI tools in your design workflow, and enthusiasm for operating as an AI-leveraged, lean design function
~ Strong grounding in user-centered design, interaction design, and Universal Design for Learning
~ A track record of building design cohesion through cross-functional partnership — influence earned, not imposed
~ Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment: shipping without waiting for perfect data, with limited resources and tight timelines
Experience designing SaaS or platform-based products
A single, consistently applied design system across all products
Product Managers seek out design partnership because it makes their features better and faster to ship
Reduced UX inconsistency and rework during development
Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance with multiple plan options
~ Company-paid short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
~401(k) retirement plan
~ 10 paid holidays plus 1 floating holiday annually
We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

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