Principal Experience Architect

Title: Principal Experience Architect Location: San Mateo, CA / Remote (Continental US + Hawaii + Canada Only)

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 why people learn

PERKS AND BENEFITS

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

• Competitive salaries
• Ample paid time off as needed – Your well-being is a priority
• 8 pre-scheduled Wellness Days in 2026 occurring on a Monday or a Friday for a 3-day weekend boost
• Remote-first culture - that caters to your time zone, with open flexibility as needed, at times
• Generous parental leave
• An exceptional team that trusts you and gives you the freedom to do your best
• The chance to put your talents towards a deeply meaningful mission and the opportunity to work on high-impact products that are already defining the future of education
• Opportunities to connect through affinity, ally, and social groups
• And we offer all those other typical benefits as well: 401(k) + 4% matching & comprehensive insurance, including medical, dental, vision, and life

At Khan Academy we are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices, the well-being of our employees, and our Khan community. This belief is why we have built out a robust Total Rewards package that includes competitive base salaries, and extensive benefits and perks to support physical, mental, and financial well-being.

The compensation band for this role is $181,654 - $204,361USD annually for candidates based in the United States and $245,471 - $276,155 CAD annually for candidates based in Canada.

The pay range for this position is a general guideline only. The salary offered will depend on internal pay equity and the candidate’s relevant skills, experience, qualifications, and job market data.

MORE ABOUT US

• Sal’s TED talk from 2011
• Sal’s TED talk from 2015
• Sal's TED talk from 2023
• Our team: 

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.