Product Designer

About this role We’re hiring our second product designer at Coteach. Coteach is an AI product used by thousands of K–12 teachers to make daily teaching more manageable: understanding tomorrow’s lesson, adapting materials for students who need more support or challenge, generating classroom‑ready resources, and making sense of student work. Design matters enormously here. Teachers are busy, skeptical of tools that create more work, and operating in complex classroom realities. The product has to feel fast, trustworthy, clear, and genuinely useful from the first interaction. This is a high‑ownership, generalist design role. You’ll work across the core teacher experience, new AI‑powered workflows, admin and coach surfaces, our design system, and occasionally brand or marketing work. You’ll lead discovery on ambiguous problems, spend real time with teachers, turn messy needs into simple product flows, and partner closely with engineers to ship polished experiences. You don’t need to be an engineer. But you should be comfortable enough with code and AI tools to prototype interactions, explore ideas quickly, and make small polish improvements yourself. We’re looking for someone with excellent craft, strong product judgment, and a real pull toward the mission. Prior education experience is welcome, but not required. You will Own design problems from ambiguity to shipped product. Take fuzzy questions like “How should teachers review student work?” or “What makes an AI‑enabled lesson adaptation trustworthy?” and turn them into clear product directions, prototypes, and shipped experiences. Spend real time with teachers. Join classroom visits, run usability sessions, watch session recordings, read interaction traces, and build a deep feel for how teachers actually plan, teach, and make decisions under time pressure. Design AI‑powered workflows that feel simple and reliable. Work on chat, agentic flows, resource generation, assessment workflows, and other AI‑native experiences where the UX challenge is not just making things look good, but making the system feel understandable, controllable, and worth trusting. Ship end‑to‑end with product and engineering. Move from sketches to Figma to prototype to production. Partner tightly with engineers, make practical trade‑offs, and stay close to the details until the thing is live. Raise the craft bar across Coteach. Improve interaction patterns, visual polish, empty states, loading states, information hierarchy, microinteractions, and the overall feel of the product. Extend our design system. Build the components, primitives, and patterns that let us move quickly without the product becoming fragmented or inconsistent. Contribute to brand and marketing surfaces when needed. Help us communicate Coteach clearly to teachers, school leaders, districts, and partners through our public site, sales collateral, visuals, and product storytelling. What you bring A portfolio of shipped product work. We care most about real things you’ve worked on: messy problem spaces you helped clarify, product decisions you made, trade‑offs you navigated, and the quality of the final user experience. Excellent product and visual craft. You design clean, modern, intuitive interfaces. You care about hierarchy, spacing, interaction details, and how a product feels in use. Strong product judgment. You can rapidly understand a problem, identify the actual user need, separate important complexity from accidental complexity, and make decisions that are both user‑centered and realistic to build. Calm, clear collaboration in evolving work. You’re comfortable when requirements change as we learn more. You communicate early, surface open questions, and help the team move forward without adding unnecessary process. A prototyping mindset. You use the fastest tool for the question at hand: Figma, Framer, HTML/CSS, React, Cursor, Claude, v0, or whatever helps make an idea feel real enough to learn from. AI fluency. You actively use AI tools in your design workflow and have opinions about where they help, where they don’t, and how AI products should behave. Preferred, not required Experience designing AI‑powered products. Experience with complex workflows, B2B products, admin tools, or data‑heavy interfaces. Experience building or extending a design system. Familiarity with K–12 schools, teachers, curriculum, assessment, or instructional materials. Experience in an early‑stage startup or small, high‑ownership product team. Compensation & structure Compensation is $10,000–$14,000/month , depending on experience. We expect most roles at this stage to be contract‑based due to our current funding model. In select cases, we may be able to consider a full‑time structure for the right candidate. We have team members in NYC, San Francisco and Seattle, so candidates in those cities will have opportunities to work together in person. That said, we’re open to fully remote for the right person. This role will also require regular travel to our district partners, to conferences, and for team gatherings. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every qualification. Great candidates come from a variety of backgrounds, and research shows underrepresented applicants often underestimate their readiness. If you’re excited about this work, we want to hear from you. About Coteach Coteach plugs directly into the curricula and assessment data teachers already use, so it can actually help with the hard parts of the job — internalizing tomorrow's lesson, differentiating for the students who need it, building targeted supports, and a lot more. One year in, and tens of thousands of teachers across 1,000+ districts are using Coteach, and we have big plans for year two! #J-18808-Ljbffr