Principal Product Designer

Quizlet’s Product Design team is hiring a Principal Product Designer to help raise design standards across the portfolio and shape an end-to-end student learning experience. This is an E2E individual contributor role that balances hands-on delivery with cross-team leadership, ensuring that design principles, interaction quality, and AI experiences feel cohesive across every student touchpoint.

Based in San Francisco, CA in a hybrid setup, the role focuses on building repeatable standards, improving the way teams critique work, and translating a long-term vision for how search, AI, and study tools work together into sequenced execution.

What you’ll do

• Set a new foundation for design standards by defining a short set of principles and a quality rubric that covers interaction, visual craft, accessibility, AI behavior, and repeatable patterns.
• Make design critique a shared practice by building and running a cross-team critique program, including its cadence, format, and rubric so the bar is consistently applied beyond your own reviews.
• Own a living model of the student journey across tools, connecting flashcards, tests, podcasts, study guides, and AI-driven discovery through handoffs that reinforce learning over time.
• Deliver high-impact customer experiences incrementally by breaking down an ideal-state vision into delightful MVP experiences, moving the organization toward the multi-year direction through what ships each quarter.
• Drive adoption of design standards for launches by flagging quality misses before release, assessing design risks, and mitigating them quickly.
• Lead major cross-product initiatives with high collaboration and limited guidance, setting vision and driving strategy while identifying the opportunities that matter most.
• Rove across priority work across the portfolio, upleveling design strategy where it has the most leverage and stepping in hands-on when delivery requires it.
• Orchestrate alignment across teams so visual and interaction conventions evolve together alongside roadmaps.
• Advise executives on the end-to-end product experience and influence company-wide decisions at executive, strategic, and long-term levels.
• Unify patterns across teams through principles, frameworks, and reference designs spanning search, AI interactions, and study experiences.
• Create step-function improvements in design quality and cohesion by conceptualizing and driving programs across the department.
• Develop a multi-year design vision and strategy for cohesive learning, including how search, AI, and study tools come together over the next two years.
• Translate vision into sequenced work that multiple teams can build toward.
• Resolve pattern fragmentation early to prevent inconsistency from reaching learners.
• Innovate in the design process by continually improving how you and the team use AI to raise quality while maintaining speed.

What you bring

• 12+ years of product design experience, with a portfolio showing company-level vision that shipped and measurably moved the business.
• Experience creating cohesion across a multi-product or multi-surface portfolio, unifying patterns, conventions, and experiences built by many teams.
• Platform and systems thinking, including designing capabilities that compose end to end and demonstrating how composition creates customer value.
• Exceptional interaction and visual craft across web and native mobile, including the ability to take MVPs from functional to delightful.
• Deep experience designing AI-powered experiences, including conversational, generative, and agentic patterns, with a point of view on how they should feel consistent across a product.
• Proven influence without authority, aligning multiple designers, PMs, and engineering leads on shared conventions and connected roadmaps.
• Clear communication with executives, including framing long-term bets and trade-offs between near-term delivery and long-term vision.
• Experience upleveling a design organization through programs, principles, critique, and mentorship that visibly raised the quality bar.
• Experience designing for students, education, or younger audiences is a plus, including familiarity with privacy and age-appropriate design.

Benefits

• Collaborate with your manager and team to create a healthy work-life balance.
• 20 vacation days that we expect you to take.
• Competitive health, dental, and vision insurance (100% employee and 75% dependent PPO, Dental, VSP Choice).
• Employer-sponsored 401k plan with company match.
• Access to LinkedIn Learning and other resources to support professional growth.
• Paid Family Leave, FSA, HSA, Commuter benefits, and Wellness benefits.
• 40 hours of annual paid time off to participate in volunteer programs of choice.

Role details

• Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid)
• Work schedule expectation: In-office at least two days a week, Wednesday and Thursday
• Employment type: Full time
• Department: Design
• Compensation: Product Design - IC6 - SF / NY / SEA; Base Salary USD 220,281 - 289,119 per year

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