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 — it requires understanding learning, institutional complexity, and what it actually takes to change practice at scale.

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 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 design work that demonstrably improved the academic user experience. The improvement is measurable — in adoption, in support volume, in what academics say when you talk to them. Not design that looked right. Design that worked.
2. Strengthened the Cadmus design system in ways that raise the quality bar across the product. Your contribution is not just to the features you owned. The system is more coherent, more consistently applied, and faster for engineers to work with because of what you built.
3. Run user research that changed how the product team framed at least one significant problem. Not validated assumptions. Generated genuine insight — about what academics actually need, what students actually experience — that shifted the direction of something meaningful.
4. Closed the gap between design intent and production reality. What you design is what ships. Engineers understand your decisions, challenge them productively, and implement them accurately. The distance between Figma and production is consistently small.

WHO YOU ARE

• 5+ years of product design in a SaaS context — with a portfolio that demonstrates strong craft and clear thinking, not just polished visuals.
• Genuine depth in interaction design and information architecture — you understand how complex systems need to be structured to feel simple.
• Proficiency in Figma or equivalent and a disciplined approach to design systems.
• Strong communication — you present and defend your decisions clearly, and you update them when the argument is better, not when the pressure is higher.

• You care about what you are designing for — the quality of a student's experience, the clarity of an academic's workflow — not just the craft itself.
• You find the complexity of educational software interesting. There is no trivial design problem at Cadmus.
• You bring a visual and interaction craft that raises the standard of the whole product, not just the features you own.
• You are honest about trade-offs. When a design decision has a cost, you name it.

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.