Principal Experience Architect

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Experience Architect (Principal Product Design Specialist) to join our Design team. This role exists because Khan Academy's product surface has grown—students, teachers, parents, and district admins now move across many products, tools, and touch points, and no single team owns the seams between them. You will be the person who sees the whole system: how a teacher's experience assigning a lesson connects to a student's experience completing it, how a district admin's reporting view relates to what happens in the classroom, and where our information architecture helps or hinders people trying to get things done.

You're not designing individual screens or flows day-to-day (though you can, and will when it matters). You're designing the underlying structure—the taxonomies, navigation models, mental models, and cross-product patterns—that make Khan Academy feel like one coherent product rather than a collection of features. You'll partner closely with the Director of Design, product designers, PMs, and engineering leads across the org, acting as both a hands-on contributor and a strategic advisor who keeps the "big picture" clear as individual teams move fast.

What You'll Do

• Ecosystem and information architecture: Own and evolve the end-to-end product interaction model and related information architecture across Khan Academy's products—navigation systems, permission and role models, and the vocabulary we use to describe things. Ensure new features extend this architecture rather than fragment it.
• Cross-product experience design: Map and design the journeys that span multiple products and user roles (student, teacher, parent, district admin), identifying where handoffs break down, where mental models conflict, and where consolidation or simplification would meaningfully improve the experience.
• Systems thinking and pattern-setting: Build and maintain the artifacts that make the ecosystem legible to the rest of the org—experience maps, service blueprints, experience architecture diagrams, and design patterns—so that product teams can make locally good decisions that also add up to a coherent whole.
• Strategic advisory and design leadership: Act as a senior voice on the Design Leadership Team, weighing in on major product decisions with an eye toward long-term coherence and scalability. Partner with design managers, PMs and technical architects to ensure architectural decisions are grounded in real user and district needs.
• Governance without gatekeeping: Develop lightweight frameworks, guidelines, and review processes that help embedded product designers align with the broader architecture—coaching and influencing rather than mandating, since you won't own every team's roadmap.
• Hands-on craft when it counts: Roll up your sleeves to prototype, wireframe, or redesign critical cross-cutting flows (e.g., navigation, onboarding, account and role management) when the problem is foundational enough to warrant direct involvement. We are an AI-enabled Design team, so the expectation is that you’d use AI tools such as Claude Cowork to complete work efficiently.

Responsibilities may change as business and team needs evolve.

What You Bring

• Deep IA and systems expertise: 12+ years of experience in product design, UX architecture, or UX strategy, with a strong track record in information architecture, ecosystem- and multi-platform interaction modeling, and systems-level design work—ideally across complex, multi-sided platforms.
• Ecosystems thinking: Demonstrated ability to zoom out from individual features to see how a whole product ecosystem fits together, and to translate that view into clear, actionable structures (maps, models, frameworks) that others can build on.
• Strong craft foundation: Excellent visual, interaction, and structural design skills. You can move fluidly between high-level architecture and detailed execution when needed.
• Cross-functional influence: A track record of guiding designers, PMs, and engineers toward shared, coherent decisions without formal authority over their teams—through clarity, credibility, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Complexity management: Experience designing for environments with multiple user types, roles, and permission structures (enterprise, B2B2C, marketplace, or platform products are all relevant backgrounds).
• Communication and storytelling: Ability to make abstract architectural concepts tangible and compelling to both design peers and non-design executive stakeholders.
• EdTech experience (preferred): Familiarity with K-12 education, school district structures, or other regulated/high-stakes environments is a strong plus, but not required.
• Motivated by the Khan Academy mission “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere."
• Proven cross-cultural competency skills demonstrating self-awareness, awareness of other, and the ability to adopt inclusive perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors to drive inclusion and belonging throughout the organization.

NOTE: Submitting a portfolio with your application is required. We're looking for a portfolio that highlights the parts of your background and experience that are relevant to the job description. Applications without a portfolio link or attachment (plus password if required) will not be considered.