Product Designer

Nurturing Critical Wisdom for the Sake of the World

Why should you join Minerva? The salary and benefits are competitive; the people you'll work with are authentic, thoughtful, driven, and human; but the reason we chose Minerva is our strong belief in the company's mission: if we want to change the world, it's imperative that we improve education everywhere.

As our first step to achieving that goal, we built Minerva University from the ground up, refining and improving every aspect of a traditional university. Minerva University boasts an unbiased admissions process, seminars instead of lectures, and a global experience over 4 years; and has been named the most innovative university in the world - three times. Now, we are expanding our reach and impact by partnering with emerging and established higher education institutions around the world.

Our methodology, which emphasizes active class participation, deliberate practice, and other empirically-proven methods, is enabled by Minerva Forum. Built to address the central educational challenges of the modern era, Minerva Forum embodies the leading research on the science of learning to enable the rapid development of sophisticated, durable skills-based programs.

The Role

We're looking for a product designer who can make complex software clear and usable, and carry a design from understanding the problem through implementation and review.

You'll work closely with another designer, engineers, and product and technology leadership to make complex software clear and usable. We're looking for someone who enjoys hands-on design, asks thoughtful questions, and can explain the reasoning behind their work.

We welcome junior, mid-level, and senior candidates. Junior designers will work on defined projects with guidance and regular review from an experienced designer. Mid-level designers will independently carry defined product work through implementation. Senior designers will take broader ownership of ambiguous problems and patterns shared across the product.

What You'll Do

• Understand the workflow. Learn what users are trying to accomplish, where the current experience breaks down, and which parts of the problem matter most. Use conversations, support feedback, research and usage data to inform your work.
• Design coherent experiences. Map flows and create designs and prototypes in Figma. Work with teammates to identify what each user role needs, including permissions, empty states, errors, and other important edge cases.
• Make the interface clear. Design layouts, hierarchy, responsive behavior and accessible interactions. Write useful labels, instructions, warnings and confirmations.
• Work with the existing design system. Reuse established components where they fit, identify when a new pattern is needed, and work with engineering to keep Figma and the implemented product consistent.
• Make practical tradeoffs. Explore options and explain their strengths and limitations. Work with experienced teammates to understand technical constraints, agree on scope, and choose an approach the team can build.
• Make your work easy to build and review. Keep designs, intended behavior, edge cases and decision notes clear enough that teammates can follow them without a live walkthrough. Seek critique early and use it to improve the work.
• Follow the design into the product. Review implementations with teammates, identify confusing or broken interactions, and help resolve them. Learn how design decisions translate into the shipped product.
• Learn from real use. Look for places where people get stuck or behave differently than expected, and bring those findings back into the next design decision.

What You'll Bring

• Examples of software design work that show your contribution, reasoning, and ability to use feedback. These may come from professional work, internships, coursework, or substantial personal projects. For experienced candidates, we'll also look for shipped work and collaboration with engineers.
• A portfolio that shows interaction design, visual clarity and thoughtful handling of complex workflows. We want to understand the constraints, decisions and iterations behind the screens.
• Working knowledge of Figma, including components and prototyping, and a willingness to develop your skills within an established design system. More experienced candidates should be comfortable using these tools independently.
• An understanding of accessibility and responsive web design, and an interest in learning the details that help people complete tasks successfully.
• The ability to identify missing information, ask useful questions and make reasonable progress while uncertainty is being resolved.
• Clear written communication, openness to critique and the ability to explain design decisions to people with different backgrounds.
• Clear communication about progress, questions, and blockers, and the ability to follow through on agreed work in a distributed team.

For senior candidates, we'd also look for evidence of framing ambiguous problems, improving patterns across multiple workflows and helping teammates make stronger design decisions.

Experience with education software, complex business applications, user research or mobile web experiences would be useful. Experience using AI tools to support exploration, prototyping or other parts of your design workflow is a plus. We're interested in how you evaluate and refine the results.

Working Together

This position is fully remote. We welcome candidates anywhere in the world who can maintain regular working-hour overlap with the team. We'll confirm the required window early in the process.

You'll own design decisions for your work in collaboration with the existing team. Product leadership will own prioritization, roadmap commitments and the business goals that guide it.

Hiring Process

Our hiring process includes an initial conversation, a design exercise and review discussion, conversations about collaboration with engineering, and a final conversation with product and technology leadership. We'll share the exercise scope, expected time commitment and interview details before each stage.

What to Share

Please share your resume or profile and a portfolio with 1–2 relevant projects. Show the problem, your role, the constraints, how the design changed, and what you learned. Professional, internship, coursework, and substantial personal projects are welcome. Anonymized case studies are welcome when your work is confidential.