ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization on a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. We already reach millions of students every month and are growing rapidly. We’re building a new type of learning institution that provides high-quality instructional and practice resources that empower learners and the teachers who support them.  Whether they’re studying metaphors, mitosis, Marbury v. Madison, or multivariable calculus, we want to offer students (and teachers) the resources to realize that they can learn anything.

WE ARE DRIVEN BY COMMUNITY

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life and so do we. We are fun, diverse, quirky people that come from a variety of backgrounds. Our team includes people from academia and from high tech companies and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. Valuing diversity, equity and inclusion is necessary for us to actualize our mission and truly impact the communities we serve. We believe that the best way to provide impactful education is to create a diverse team of people from different backgrounds, races, religions, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and experiences.  We’re a hardworking team that’s passionate about helping learners and teachers around the globe! We strive to be world class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

THE ROLE

As Senior Design Project Manager, you will work on the Marketing, Philanthropy and Product (“MPP”) design team, supporting Khan Academy’s Brand & visual language - and their proliferation throughout our organization, and the world. As a DPM, you will play a leading role in organizing, planning, and operationalizing the team’s design projects and ensuring successful delivery. As a DPM, you understand what it takes to be a strong advocate for visual design and are experienced enough to know how to navigate different working styles, communication with different stakeholders and external partners and groups. You have a holistic approach to collaboration and are able to stay extremely organized, are always comfortable pushing for clarity,  and communicating thoughtfully in a complex and sometimes fast-paced environment.

What you'll do:

• Lead the organizing, planning, and operationalizing of the team’s design projects in order to  ensure successful delivery. 
• Rally internal and external stakeholders around project  goals, help negotiate timelines, and hold stakeholders accountable.
• Communicate projects’ status in order to engender transparency and clarity 
• Collaborate with and support designers to help us strengthen, evolve, and help educate the organization about our visual language and user experience, and it’s importance to Khan Academy's mission.
• Collaborate with the MPP Design Manager to help plan and manage timelines for design work that is on time, on brand, and high quality.
• Oversee logistical aspects of all Visual Design projects during their full life cycle, from requirements gathering to design execution to archiving.
• Help educate and advocate for design and conceptual cohesiveness across brand, marketing, product, and content.
• Help evangelize for injecting moments of joy into our communications, culture and product. 
• Help run the Visual Design team intake processes, project management tools, and constantly seek opportunities for workflow improvements to boost efficiency and team sustainability.
• Take the lead in defining and gathering requirements, provide designers with clear goals, and set them up for success on their projects and initiatives.
• Help facilitate workshops and conversations that help other teams incorporate visual and emotional design.
• Ask good questions.
• Protect designer sustainability, by defending their time, process, and expertise.
• Liaise on behalf of the Visual Design team with other teams and contractors (marketing, philanthropy, product, engineering, content, agencies, etc).

About the team:

The design team is a small, highly diverse group of people. Each member has a lot of impact and makes huge contributions across the board. There are currently 16 people on the team, from a wide variety of backgrounds: media (Vox), civics (18F), consumer (AirBnB, Square), enterprise (IBM), service (Starbucks) and the agency world (IDEO, 2x4). About half of the team is based in the Bay Area, and half is distributed across California, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, Texas and New York — so we operate in a creatively distributed-friendly way.

WHAT YOU BRING

• You are extremely organized, a skilled planner, and get energy from asking  questions that can help illuminate problems for your designer teammates to solve.
• You have a strong understanding of the design process, and are good at seeing opportunities to communicate clearly, remove impediments and take care of the humans you work with.
• Familiarity or experiences with design principles, and the importance of color, typography and layout, brand, etc.
• Although you will not be in charge of creating designs, strong familiarity with design tools, such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Figma, is required
• You have strong communication skills.
• You are a creative problem solver, you are extremely effective in proposing and implementing solutions
• You can create repeatable processes and yield efficiencies for designers
• You can  work with a low-ego, highly collaborative, cross-functional team.
• You have provable experience in project management. Bonus points if you have *product* management experience as well.
• You have a deep curiosity about how and why people learn - and how they respond to visual and emotional cues.
• You are charged up by the thought of working with a group of talented, funny, soulful humans ( who can’t wait to meet you).

PERKS AND BENEFITS

We may be a non-profit, but we reward our talented team extremely well!

• Highly competitive salaries and annual bonuses
• Ample paid time off as needed – we are about getting things done, not face time
• Generous parental leave
• Flexible work and time-off schedules to encourage work-family balance and holidays
• A fun, high-caliber team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to be brilliant 
• The ability to improve real lives and the opportunity to work on high-impact software and programs that are already defining the future of education
• Affinity groups where Parents, Black and Hispanic/Latino, Women and Gender Minorities, and LGBTQIA+ identified folks come together
• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance including medical, dental, vision, and life

MORE ABOUT US

• Why design at Khan Academy?
• Meet the design team!
• Why Sal created Khan Academy

OUR COMPANY VALUES

Live & breathe learners

We deeply understand and empathize with our users. We leverage user insights, research, and experience to build content, products, services, and experiences that our users trust and love. Our success is defined by the success of our learners and educators.

Take a stand

As a company, we have conviction in our aspirational point of view of how education will evolve. The work we do is in service to moving towards that point of view. However, we also listen, learn and flex in the face of new data, and commit to evolving this point of view as the industry and our users evolve.

Embrace diverse perspectives

We are a diverse community. We seek out and embrace a diversity of voices, perspectives and life experiences leading to stronger, more inclusive teams and better outcomes. As individuals, we are committed to bringing up tough topics and leaning into different points of view with curiosity. We actively listen, learn and collaborate to gain a shared understanding. When a decision is made, we commit to moving forward as a united team.

Work responsibly and sustainably

We understand that achieving our audacious mission is a marathon, so we set realistic timelines and we focus on delivery that also links to the bigger picture. As a non-profit, we are supported by the generosity of donors as well as strategic partners, and understand our responsibility to our finite resources. We spend every dollar as though it were our own. We are responsible for the impact we have on the world and to each other. We ensure our team and company stay healthy and financially sustainable.

Bring out the joy

We are committed to making learning a joyful process. This informs what we build for our users and the culture we co-create with our teammates, partners and donors.

Cultivate learning mindset

We believe in the power of growth for learners and for ourselves. We constantly learn and teach to improve our offerings, ourselves, and our organization. We learn from our mistakes and aren’t afraid to fail. We don't let past failures or successes stop us from taking future bold action and achieving our goals.

Deliver wow

We insist on high standards and deliver delightful, effective end-to-end experiences that our users can rely on. We choose to focus on fewer things — each of which aligns to our ambitious vision — so we can deliver high-quality experiences that accelerate positive measurable learning with our strategic partners.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we encourage candidates from historically underrepresented groups to apply.