Principal Experience Architect

Notice to applicants:

We have seen a rise in recruitment scams. Please note that outreach from Khan Academy recruiters will only come from the @khanacademy.org domain. Our team does not use Gmail or other personal accounts for contacting potential candidates. Khan Academy will never solicit money, equipment fees, or sensitive financial information at any stage of the hiring process. We also do not work with external recruiting agencies, so outreach from headhunters presenting opportunities on behalf of Khan Academy is illegitimate. Please always check the email domain and cross-reference the position with the official Khan Academy Careers page to confirm an opening is valid.

ABOUT KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission to deliver a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Our proven learning platform offers free, high-quality supplemental learning content and practice that cover Pre-K - 12th grade and early college core academic subjects, focusing on math and science. We have over 181 million registered learners globally and are committed to improving learning outcomes for students worldwide, focusing on learners in historically under-resourced communities.

OUR COMMUNITY

Our students, teachers, and parents come from all walks of life, and so do we. Our team includes people from academia, traditional/non-traditional education, big tech companies, and tiny startups. We hire great people from diverse backgrounds and experiences because it makes our company stronger. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as necessary to achieve our mission and impact the communities we serve. We know that transforming education starts in-house with learning about ourselves and our colleagues. We strive to be world-class in investing in our people and commit to developing you as a professional.

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.

QUALITIES WE VALUE IN OURSELVES, AND THOSE WHO JOIN OUR TEAM

Introspective, mature, low-ego, and emotionally intelligent

Growth mindset, willingness to learn and to teach others

Proactively seek out the people and info you need to move work forward and unblock yourself

High comfort level working within a strong top-down product vision led by our CEO, Sal Khan

Able to balance the immediate tactical needs of helping deliver and ship features with scouting ahead for what's next

Comfortable with ever-shifting priorities and ambiguous situations, like you'd experience in a startup

Willing to roll your sleeves up and pitch in when a project goes off-script

Excited about education and engaging learning experiences, deeply curious about how and wh