Product Designer II

Product Designer II

Over the last 14 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the administrators, teachers, and specialists who support English Learners. Today, nearly 2,000 districts across the country use Ellevation software to drive English language development in their schools. We are a successful, growing business with a real mission: helping ELLs achieve their highest aspirations.

We're growing our Product Design organization to support a strategic evolution: from a suite of point solutions into an integrated ELD platform. Design is at the center of this shift. We're building the underlying data and systems architecture that makes this integration possible - connecting compliance, instruction, and assessment into workflows that are consistent, scalable, and easy to extend as the platform grows. This isn't just about surface-level polish; it's about defining how information flows and how systems hold together as complexity increases. We're looking for an experienced Product Designer who can shape solutions that feel like one coherent system, not a collection of tools.

You'll work with a cross-functional team to understand user problems deeply, define the right experience to solve them, and ship solutions that create real value. You will leverage various modes -- from sketching and wireframing to prototyping in code using LLMs to explore ideas and stress-test concepts. And you'll leverage Backpack, our design system, to create consistent and integrated experiences across our product.

We are organized into small, durable product teams that develop solutions in specific domains. Our teams are cross-functional—product, design, and engineering work so closely together that we call ourselves DevPro and rarely meet in functional silos. We focus on outcomes over output, which means we engage users early, validate hypotheses through research and prototyping, and iterate rapidly toward high-confidence solutions.

While we work in separate teams, we prioritize integration and consistency of our solutions meaning consistency isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a critical part of our end goal.

We expect AI tools to be central to designers’ workflows as on-demand collaborators that can help explore ideas quickly: generating variations, stress-testing concepts, and moving from problem to prototype faster than traditional methods allow. This isn't about replacing craft; it's about using AI to expand what's possible within a time constraint. 

We value Product Designers who think strategically and are able to look at problems from multiple angles, weigh tradeoffs, and articulate how a solution meets the needs of both users and the business. We celebrate accountability to outcomes: conducting experiments, adjusting strategy based on learnings, and delivering products that change behavior and drive real value.

• 1 month - Build a clear picture of the strategic context and challenges facing Ellevation and understand how that applies to your team’s domains. Build relationships across the design team and understand team culture and rituals. Develop rapport with key cross-functional collaborators. 

• 3 months - Continue building trust and shared goals with key collaborators. Be an active member of the Design Team. Contribute to your product team’s initiatives through participating in user research, discovery, prototyping workflows. Demonstrate how your work connects to team objectives.

• 6 months - Own the design of your product area, work with your team to build effective feedback loops, own objectives, and continuously deliver results based on learnings. Leverage the trust you have built to promote design thinking and best practices within your team. Strengthen relationships across R&D to enable cross-functional work. 

• 12 months - Use the expertise and context you've built over the past year to deepen your ownership of your product area and contribute to decisions that shape its direction. Continue feeding improvements back into Backpack, our design system, as part of your day-to-day work. Model our design culture and values within your team.

• You have 5+ years of demonstrated success as a cross-functional designer in a B2B SaaS or adjacent environment.

• You're AI-fluent - using LLM-assisted prototyping to accelerate ideation and validation, freeing you to focus on craft and systems thinking.

• You design with accessibility as a first-class constraint, not a compliance checkbox - building it into your process from the start.

• You're accountable to outcomes, not just output. You run experiments, learn from what ships, and measure success by whether the product changes behavior.

• You go to the source. You've conducted user research and usability testing in the field, and you bring the team along—synthesizing insights so the whole squad can design from evidence, not assumptions.

• You seek feedback and confront hard truths. Craft is a practice, not a credential—you iterate with users, engineers, and data.

• You bring diverse perspectives into your process and design with empathy for users unlike yourself.

• You think in systems, creating coherent experiences across workflows rather than isolated features.

• You bring people along. You articulate tradeoffs clearly, engage actively in critique, and contribute to a culture of design excellence.

Travel Expectations

• Boston-area preferred

• New England-area employees will be expected to travel to Boston for a minimum 2 days a month 10x a year.