Founding Product Designer
Seattle, WAFull-time$160–190K/yrPosted 1w agoStill listed today
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At a glance
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Job overview
Scholarly is hiring its first full-time designer to own product design across administrator and faculty experiences, its design system, and brand materials. The designer will work directly with engineering and leadership, shape product decisions, and establish design processes and standards. The role is based on-site with the engineering team in Seattle’s Pioneer Square and focuses on AI-powered software for higher education.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
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
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Own product design end-to-end. Take features from fuzzy customer problem to shipped, polished experience - workflows, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Shape the brand. Lead design for our website, sales and demo materials, and the documents we put in front of prospective customers.
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Guide product decisions. You'll have a real voice in what we build and why, not just how it looks.
QUALIFICATIONS
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7 or more years of product design experience, with a portfolio that shows complex, workflow-heavy or data-dense products shipped to real users.
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Experience building or significantly evolving a design system.
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Hands-on user research experience - you've planned and run your own studies.
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Working knowledge of front-end code (HTML, CSS).
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Brand or marketing design experience is a strong plus.
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Experience in higher education, healthcare, HR, or other enterprise/regulated software is a plus, but not required.
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Authorized to work in the United States (citizen or green card holder). We're not able to sponsor visas at this time.
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Excited to work on-site in Seattle 5 days per week.
How this job compares
Set against the 1,887 open Product Designer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 4, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$160–190K/yr
- Washington median$138–199K/yr103 salary ranges
- US median$147–206K/yr1,390 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $175K, is 4% above the Washington median midpoint ($169K) — in the middle half of Product Designer salary ranges in Washington.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 110 open Product Designer jobs in Washington and 1,887 across the US. 9% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 7 years of experience; Product Designer postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years at the median (1,505 postings).
- Education
- 368 of the 1,887 open Product Designer jobs (20%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 4, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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