Founding Product Designer

About Primer

Fixing our K-12 education system is a civilizationally-important problem. We believe that all of our problems — including the ones that dominate the headlines — are downstream of education.

We have a simple thesis on how to solve it: empower 1,000’s of educators to launch microschools in their communities.

We believe the historical tradeoff between price (tuition) and quality is a false dichotomy.

PrimerOS automates and eliminates much of the costs of traditional schools. Microschools have a structural advantage — asset-light real estate — which means much lower capex and opex. You put it together, and you get something that’s never existed before: a world-class education that’s accessible to normal American families and can rapidly scale.

The software we build powers our schools end-to-end. From day one, it helps teachers source real estate, recruit students, and provide an (actually) personalized education to every student. It offers rich insights to parents, enables virtual teachers to deliver exceptional experiences, and runs our back-office operations. We have a huge surface area to cover and a lot of hard work in front of us.

We’re building a small team of exceptional, hands-on designers and engineers to play a critical role in building Primer - and you’ll be joining to set the direction of the design team.

Role overview

We are seeking a talented Founding Product Designer to join our team. In this role, you’ll work with our head of product and small engineering team to reimagine the school experience through technology, creating tools that support teachers, students, and families in meaningful ways. You’ll drive the design of a product that makes education more accessible, impactful, and personalized.

This role is based in San Francisco, and you will work with our small team including product leadership, UX, education, engineering, and curriculum experts.

What you’ll do

• End-to-End Design: Own the design process from discovery through delivery. You’ll do research, map out user journeys, design interfaces, and collaborate with product and engineering to bring features to life.

• User-Centered Problem Solving: Conduct user research and collect learnings to share with the team and help make design decisions.

• Design Collaboration: Work every day with engineering, product, and our academic team to make designs functional, accessible, and aligned with Primer’s educational goals.

• Establish a Design Culture: Define design standards, drive best practices, and advocate for high-quality design across the organization.

• Craft Beautiful, Usable Experiences: Build interfaces that are as delightful as they are functional.

What we’re looking for

• Passion for Education: You’re deeply motivated by the opportunity to reshape education and believe that great design can fundamentally improve learning experiences.

• Thrives in Ambiguity: The open-ended challenges of an early-stage company excite you. You love diving into the unknown to solve complex problems.

• Design Fundamentals: You have a strong command of UX research, visual design, interaction design, and prototyping.

• Attention to Detail: You take pride in your work and want to deliver the best possible experience for our users. Watching someone struggle with an interface you designed drives you nuts.

• Experience Building from Zero: You have experience owning design projects from conception to launch, ideally in a startup environment.

A typical week may include...

• Monday: Begin your week reviewing the latest prototype of our virtual instruction UI with the product team. Plan for user testing with teachers in live classes.

• Tuesday: Connect with two parents from our Primer community to learn about their experience with our platform, focusing on usability and engagement.

• Wednesday: Heads-down day focused on design and prototype updates to prepare for testing.

• Thursday: Test the new virtual instruction UI prototype with three Primer teachers, giving you hands-on feedback to help iterate and refine our designs.

• Friday: Conduct market research on academic progress tracking systems to inform design of our student goal-setting and measurement tool.

Join Us

We want you to do the best work of your life at Primer. If you’re excited about shaping the future of education and eager to tackle challenging, meaningful projects, we’d love to hear from you.x

Inspiration

Below are a few of the people and pieces that serve as the inspiration for our work at Primer. If any of these resonate with you, we’d be quite excited to chat.

• 📄 A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages by Alan Kay [1972]

• 📘 Mindstorms by Seymour Papert [1980]

• 📄 Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem by Benjamin Bloom [1984]

• 📄 The Shame of American Education by B.F. Skinner [1984]

• 📘 The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neil Stephenson [1995]

• 📄 Learning in depth: Knowledge and the Imagination by Kieran Egan [2010]

• 📄 What’s Gone Wrong in Schooling? by Mason Hartman [2019]

• 📄 How can we develop transformative tools for thought? by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen [2019]

• 📄 The Lesson to Unlearn by Paul Graham [2019]

• 📄 Enabling Environments by Andy Matuschak [2019]

If this sounds like you, fill out the application below with a bit about yourself and we’ll take it from there! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us at [email protected].