Senior Product Designer

The Cadmus platform shapes how millions of students and tens of thousands of academics experience assessment. That is a design challenge that goes well beyond interface; understanding learning, institutional complexity, and how assessment workflows actually function in practice.

Cadmus is built on the proposition that design is the mechanism of academic integrity. When assessment is designed well, students do not need to cheat. When a platform is designed well, academics do not resist it. The Senior Product Designer will shape how that proposition is experienced in practice.

You will own design end-to-end across core platform areas — from discovery and problem framing through to high-fidelity delivery and post-launch iteration — working directly with product managers, engineers, and the learning team.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE:

In your first year, you will have:

1. Shipped meaningful improvements to core academic workflows: Your work measurably improves the experience for academics and students, reflected in adoption, reduced support friction, and direct user feedback. This is not just design that looks better, but design that clearly works better.
2. Elevated the product’s visual and interaction quality through the design system: You strengthen and extend the Cadmus design system in ways that raise the bar across the product. The system becomes more coherent, more consistently applied, and more useful for both designers and engineers. As a result, design decisions scale and engineering velocity improves.
3. Introduced user insights that changed product direction: You design and conduct research that surfaces non-obvious insights about academic and student needs, shifting how the team frames and approaches at least one meaningful problem. You go beyond validating assumptions to generating new understanding.
4. Reduced the gap between design and production: What you design is what ships. You work closely with engineers to ensure designs are feasible, well-understood, and implemented with high fidelity. You understand technical constraints and use them to make better design decisions, not avoid them. The distance between Figma and production consistently decreases.
5. Balanced craft with delivery: You raise the quality bar of the product without relying on large, speculative redesigns. You make thoughtful trade-offs, delivering improvements that are both high-quality and practical to build.

Requirements

WHO YOU ARE

• Experience & craft
• 7–10 years of product design experience in SaaS or similarly complex digital products
• A portfolio that demonstrates strong UI/UX craft, systems thinking, and shipped work in production—not just conceptual redesigns
• Strong visual design skills, with the ability to create clean, modern, and cohesive product experiences within a system
• Systems & complexity
• Deep experience in UX and information architecture for complex workflows
• Ability to simplify without oversimplifying—bringing clarity to dense or nuanced product areas
• Product thinking
• Strong product judgment—you balance user needs, business goals, and technical constraints
• You articulate decisions clearly using reasoning, data, and evidence
• You are comfortable being challenged and updating your thinking when needed
• Pragmatism & execution
• You apply a high bar for craft within real product constraints
• You make deliberate trade-offs and are explicit about the cost of design decisions
• You prioritise shipping meaningful improvements over pursuing ideal but impractical solutions
• You have a track record of taking work from concept through to production and iteration
• Collaboration
• You work closely with engineers to co-create solutions that are both high-quality and buildable
• You partner with product managers to shape problems, not just execute on them
• You are comfortable operating in day-to-day product decisions, not just design critiques
• Mindset
• You are motivated by improving real user experiences in complex domains
• You hold a high bar for quality while staying grounded in what is achievable
• You advocate for better experiences, and adapt your approach based on context and constraints

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT:

• Not a concept-only role - You won’t be creating speculative redesigns. You’re expected to take work from idea to production.
• Not a blank-slate redesign - You’ll improve and evolve an existing product, not start from scratch.
• Not detached from engineering - Your designs need to be practical, buildable, and developed in close collaboration with engineers.
• Not purely execution - You won’t just deliver screens. You’ll help shape problems and decisions.
• Not perfection over progress - You balance high craft with shipping meaningful improvements.

Benefits

WORKING AT CADMUS

Design at Cadmus operates close to the problem. You will work directly with the people making product and learning decisions, have access to real users across multiple countries, and see your work shipped and evaluated quickly. The design team is small, which means your influence is outsized and your ownership is real. It also means you will need to hold your own in conversations that go well beyond interface — into learning theory, institutional behaviour, and what assessment is actually trying to do.