Over the last 14 years, Ellevation Education has built a thriving business serving the educators who support English Learners. Today, nearly 2,000 districts across the country use Ellevation software to drive English Language Development (ELD) in their schools. We are a successful, growing business with a real mission: helping ELLs achieve their highest aspirations.
We're hiring a Director of Design to lead this function as we pursue our goal of being the premier and most impactful ELD solution on the market. This role reports to our Chief Product & Technology Officer and serves on the R&D Leadership team, where Design sits alongside Product and Engineering as an equal partner in developing strategy and setting direction. As we evolve from a suite of point solutions into an integrated ELD platform, design plays a central role in defining what the experience should be, not just what it looks like.
You'll inherit a team of four product designers (with one to two open roles to fill) supporting work across four product domains. The core challenge is how to is how to connect our compliance, instruction, and assessment tools into a set of unified workflows that drive impact in the classroom and across the district. Doing this requires a design leaders who can think strategically, scale design craft, and influence peers across R&D. The right candidate will bring a sharp recruiting eye, strong people leadership, and enough hands-on judgment to set the bar. The job requires not only the ability to identify and nurture talent, but also to build belonging and deliver through others.
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 like Claude Cowork and Claude Code 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 constraints.
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.