Lead Product Designer

Do your best work, for the right reasons.

Teachers across England use Oak to plan and teach, and every lesson reaches them through products our team designs. We’re looking for a Lead Product Designer to lead our team of product designers, set the standard for design across our product squads and make sure what we build works for every teacher and pupil.

Oak is a fully remote, mission-driven organisation offering high levels of flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. We’re a national not-for-profit working in partnership with teachers to create the highest-quality, sequenced curriculum and lesson resources for pupils across all subjects and age groups.

Our culture has been independently recognised through:

• Flexa verified (93% overall score, including 95% for working hours and 97% for role modelling)
• Escape the City's Top 1% Employers – based on anonymous colleague reviews of culture, development, and impact
• Investors in People Gold - through external accreditation and colleague feedback

About the Role

This is a hands-on lead role. You’ll spend around 70% of your time designing, from user journeys and flows to high-fidelity prototypes and production. The other 30% is leading, mentoring and shaping how the team works.

You’ll be part of the product design team and embedded in cross-functional squads, working day-to-day with product managers, engineers, and user researchers. You’ll own our design standards and design system, and set design direction across squads. You’ll use research and data to show the difference a well-designed product makes for users. When we need extra capacity, you’ll also brief and manage external design contractors.

We’re a fully remote team. You’ll be comfortable working asynchronously and building relationships online, and you’ll keep a team aligned without becoming a bottleneck. As part of the wider Oak team, you’ll help shape our strategy, planning and culture.

What you'll be doing:

• Develop and manage a high-performing team of product designers.
• Responsible for the continuous improvement of product and feature design quality across all product squads. 
• Own design standards, principles, and ways of working across Oak’s product development, championing quality, accessibility and user experience. 
• Guide feature design across squads, setting design direction based on user and business needs.
• Champion the use of data and user research to ensure Oak’s products deliver industry leading and highly accessible UX and UI. 
• Maintain specialist expertise in product design systems and methodologies and be an authority across Oak and more widely across the sector.
• As a member of the Oak Team, you will contribute to the strategy, planning and model the  culture of the organisation.
• Work in cross-functional and product-oriented squads with colleagues from across the organisation, as required.
• Deputise for the Head of Product (Schools & Teachers) and take on other general responsibilities as required.
• Lead the design and development of specific features, working closely with others to set design requirements based on user & business needs.
• Support the development and continuous improvement of product design, systems and methodologies.
• Support the design and development of key elements of the product design lifecycle including user journeys, user flows, creating prototypes, testing, developing high-fidelity prototypes, and seeing designs through to production.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years holding responsibility for the continuous improvement of product and feature design in digital products and services.
• Experience in recruiting, developing and managing a high-performing team of product designers.
• Proven success leading a design discipline and setting standards and direction across multiple teams.
• Proven success in building and maintaining a highly accessible design system at scale.
• Extensive knowledge of user experience and user interface best practices across mobile and desktop devices.
• Demonstrated experience working with highly accessible design systems that support a large user base
• Experience working in product teams to understand and solve user needs, and implement new features
• Desirable: extensive experience using the latest product design tools, including Figma and Figma Make and/or other AI-powered design software.

The successful candidate will have a desire to contribute across all areas to ensure Oak's success. You will be comfortable moving quickly and with agility, and be confident working with a range of digital systems (including proprietary ones, as required). You will continually look for ways that the team can keep getting better. You will be excellent at working as part of a remote team, building relationships and managing your time effectively

See how we work

Want to know more about how we build our products? Our Engineering Substack shares how we build AI and data tools for education, including the decisions, trade-offs and lessons we've learned along the way. Read Oak's Engineering Substack - https://engineering.thenational.academy/

Our Benefits

• 25 days annual leave, plus one extra day for each year of service (up to 28)

• Additional Oak closure days over Christmas/New Year

• 11% employer pension contribution (with no minimum employee contribution)

• A 36-hour working week, with half-days on Fridays or every other Friday off

• Fully remote working - we’ll support your home set-up and offer coworking options if preferred

• Twice-yearly in-person offsites to collaborate, connect, and have fun

• A culture that genuinely supports flexibility, autonomy, and trust

Inclusion and Belonging

We believe diverse teams build better products. We warmly welcome applicants from all backgrounds, particularly those who are underrepresented in the tech and education sectors. 

If you're from an underrepresented group, there's a good chance you're discounting yourself before you've even started. That's more common than you'd think, and it means we may miss out on brilliant people. If you're excited by this role but are not sure if you meet every requirement, please apply anyway.

We use the Applied platform to help reduce bias in our hiring process. Answers are anonymised and reviewed by a panel of humans.

Key Info

• Location: Remote, but you must be based in the UK with the legal right to work here

• Sponsorship: Unfortunately, we’re unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time

• Closing date: Sunday, 8 November 2026. We’ll be reviewing applications as they come in and may close the role early

If this sounds like the kind of role and team where you could do your life’s best work, we’d love to hear from you.

Next steps

You’ll answer a few admin questions and some questions related to your day-to-day job. Your answers will go through our sift process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised, and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers (real humans), so it's your thinking that gets assessed, not your CV.

If you're shortlisted, we'll invite you to interview. We give everyone feedback at the end of the process.

Interview dates: 17 and 18 November 2026

We are receiving excellent responses to our job advertisements. This may lead us to close the role early, so if you are considering applying, don't leave it too long or you may miss out.

We are an equal opportunity employer.

We are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, or sexual orientation, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.