Principal Product Designer

ABOUT QUIZLET:

At Quizlet, our mission is to help every learner achieve their outcomes in the most effective and delightful way. We’re a $1B+ learning platform used by two-thirds of U.S. high school students and half of college students, powering over 1 billion learning interactions each week.

We blend cognitive science with machine learning to personalize and enhance the learning experience for students, professionals, and lifelong learners alike. We’re energized by the potential to power more learners through multiple approaches and various tools.

Let’s Build the Future of Learning

Join us to design and deliver AI-powered learning tools that scale across the world and unlock human potential.

WHY JOIN QUIZLET?

🌎 Massive reach: 60M+ users, 1B+ interactions per week 🧠 Cutting-edge tech: Generative AI, adaptive learning, cognitive science 📈 Strong momentum: Top-tier investors, sustainable business, real traction 🎯 Mission-first: Work that makes a difference in people’s lives 🤝 Inclusive culture: Committed to equity, diversity, and belonging

ABOUT THE TEAM:

We’re looking for a Principal Product Designer to join Quizlet’s Product Design team and raise the bar for end-to-end design across our portfolio. You’ll make Quizlet feel like one cohesive learning experience, not a collection of features.

Students study across many kinds of materials: flashcards, tests and quizzes, podcasts, and AI-enabled study guides. They find them through search, and increasingly through AI. Each of these is built by a different team, and each is a powerful capability on its own. Your job is to orchestrate them, so a student moves between them seamlessly and gets more value from the whole than from any single part.

This is an E2E IC role. You may shape strategy for single initiatives and go deep in one area (for instance, starting with the Quizlet Community experience) while you’ll rove across high-priority projects, upleveling design strategy where it matters most. You’ll dive in hands-on when delivery needs you. You’ll partner with design, product, and engineering leaders across teams, and act as a strategic advisor to the executive team on the long-term shape of the product.

This role is ideal for a principal designer who thinks in systems and platform capabilities, loves orchestrating work across many teams, and refuses to ship anything that’s merely functional when it could be delightful. You'll have an opportunity to re-define the design standards we establish as a team and obsess over design details, while working directly with product, design, and engineering across the org to ensure design intent becomes reality across the entire portfolio.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

Scope & Impact

• Redefine the bar for Quizlet's design standards from the ground up: a short set of design principles, a quality rubric covering interaction, visual craft, accessibility, AI behavior, and the patterns that make it repeatable.
• Design critique as the team's core practice. Build and run a cross-team crit program, with its cadence, format, and the rubric as a shared language, so the bar is applied in every review, not only the ones you're in.
• The student journey across tools within the product. A living model of how flashcards, tests, podcasts, study guides, and AI-driven discovery connect, hand off, and reinforce one another.
• While shaping our long-term trajectory, you’ll also deliver high impact customer experience incrementally, breaking down the ideal state vision into delightful MVP experiences that set the standard for what exceptional design and product delivery looks like. What ships this quarter moves us toward the multi-year vision

Autonomy & Collaboration

• Drive adoption and use of design standards for every launch our teams ship. You have the standing and influence to flag work that misses it before launch, assess quality risks, and mitigate them with speed.
• Lead major, long-term cross-product initiatives with high collaboration but limited guidance: identify the opportunities, set the vision, and drive the strategy
• Rove across projects in the portfolio, upleveling design strategy where it has the most leverage, and dive in hands-on when delivery needs you
• Orchestrate work across multiple designers and teams, aligning both the visual and interaction conventions they adopt together and the roadmaps that let them deliver together
• Act as a strategic advisor to the executive team on the end-to-end product experience

Communication & Influence

• Influence company-wide decisions at an executive, strategic, and long-term level
• Advocate change across Quizlet, building shared conviction about what great end-to-end design looks like
• Unify patterns across teams, including search, AI interactions, and study experiences, through principles, frameworks, and reference designs that other designers adopt
• Conceptualize and drive programs that create step-function improvements in design quality and cohesion across the department

Problem Solving & Execution

• Develop the multi-year design vision and strategy for a cohesive Quizlet. Example: how should search, AI, and our study tools come together over the next two years to help students learn across all their materials?
• Translate that vision into concrete, sequenced work that multiple teams can build toward
• Recognize where patterns are fragmenting and resolve them before they reach learners
• Continually innovate on how you and the team use AI in the design process, raising the bar for quality delivered with speed

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE:

• [12+] years of product design experience, with a portfolio showing company-level vision that shipped and measurably moved the business
• A track record of creating cohesion across a multi-product or multi-surface portfolio, unifying patterns, conventions, and experiences built by many teams
• Platform and systems thinking: you design individual capabilities so they can be composed end to end, and you can show how that composition created new customer value
• Exceptional interaction and visual craft across web and native mobile, with a demonstrated ability to take MVPs from functional to delightful
• Deep experience designing AI-powered experiences, including conversational, generative, and agentic patterns, and a point of view on how they should feel consistent across a product
• Proven influence without authority: you’ve aligned multiple designers, PMs, and engineering leads on shared conventions and connected roadmaps
• Clear, compelling communication with executives, including framing long-term bets and the trade-offs between near-term delivery and long-term vision
• Experience upleveling a design org 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

WORK LOCATION

We’re happy to share that this is a hybrid position in our San Francisco office. To support collaboration, we ask employees to be in the office at least two days a week: Wednesday and Thursday.

COMPENSATION, BENEFITS & PERKS:

• 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

We strive to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome!

We work to create a holistic interview process, where both Quizlet and candidates have an opportunity to view what it would be like to work together, in exploring a mutually beneficial partnership. We provide a transparent setting that gives a comprehensive view of who we are!

IN CLOSING:

At Quizlet, we’re excited about passionate people joining our team - even if you don’t check every box on the requirements list. We value unique perspectives and believe everyone has something meaningful to contribute. Our culture is all about taking initiative, learning through challenges, and striving for high-quality work while staying curious and open to new ideas. We believe in honest, respectful communication, thoughtful collaboration, and creating a supportive space where everyone can grow and succeed together.”

Quizlet’s success as an online learning community depends on a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

As an equal opportunity employer and a tech company committed to societal change, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds. Women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, individuals with disabilities, and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply.

TO ALL RECRUITERS AND PLACEMENT AGENCIES

At this time Quizlet does not accept unsolicited agency resumes and/or profiles.

Please do not forward unsolicited agency resumes to our website or to any Quizlet employee. Quizlet will not pay fees to any third-party agency or firm nor will it be responsible for any agency fees associated with unsolicited resumes. All unsolicited resumes received will be considered the property of Quizlet.