Founding Product Designer

ABOUT SCHOLARLY

Scholarly is building the next generation of AI-powered software for higher education with a faculty-first focus. As institutions face a wave of digital transformation, our mission is to become the AI-native system of record for faculty data.

Our platform unifies fragmented workflows into a single, intelligent system - powering annual reviews, promotion & tenure, appointment tracking, and more - while eliminating manual data entry and improving decision-making for institutions. We're a mission-driven, product-focused team shaping the future of higher education.

POSITION OVERVIEW

Scholarly is hiring its first full-time designer. As our Founding Product Designer, you'll own how Scholarly looks, feels, and works - from the data-dense screens administrators live in every day, to the faculty-facing experiences that need to just work, to the website and materials that introduce us to new institutions.

We're looking for a designer with 7 or more years of experience, including meaningful time shipping complex B2B or SaaS products. You'll work directly with engineering and leadership, and you'll be the person who sets up how design works at Scholarly: the system, the process, and the bar. You can read about how we work in this blog post https://kellysutton.com/2025/08/04/how-were-working-2025.html.

This role is based in Seattle and on-site with the engineering team in Pioneer Square.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own product design end-to-end. Take features from fuzzy customer problem to shipped, polished experience - workflows, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design.
• Build and own the Scholarly design system. Define the components, tokens, and patterns our frontend is built on, including the dense tables and grids that power faculty data management.
• Talk to our users. Run interviews, usability tests, and site visits with faculty, department administrators, and faculty affairs teams at our customer institutions, and turn what you learn into product direction.
• Prototype in code. You're comfortable in HTML and CSS - whether that's building a high-fidelity prototype, pairing with an engineer, or shipping a front-end polish fix yourself. Claude and other AI tools are your force multipliers.
• Shape the brand. Lead design for our website, sales and demo materials, and the documents we put in front of prospective customers.
• Guide product decisions. You'll have a real voice in what we build and why, not just how it looks.

QUALIFICATIONS

• 7 or more years of product design experience, with a portfolio that shows complex, workflow-heavy or data-dense products shipped to real users.
• Experience building or significantly evolving a design system.
• Hands-on user research experience - you've planned and run your own studies.
• Working knowledge of front-end code (HTML, CSS).
• Brand or marketing design experience is a strong plus.
• Experience in higher education, healthcare, HR, or other enterprise/regulated software is a plus, but not required.
• Authorized to work in the United States (citizen or green card holder). We're not able to sponsor visas at this time.
• Excited to work on-site in Seattle 5 days per week.