Senior Product Designer
What This Role Is
There are 1,000-plus universities across 100-plus countries trying to reach the right students, and almost none of them can tell you, with any confidence, why a given student converted. They can tell you volume. They can tell you which fair or campaign brought in the most leads. What they can rarely tell you is why a recommendation worked, or what a counselor, an applicant, or an admissions team actually needed to see in that moment to make a good decision faster. That gap between data and understanding is a design problem before it is anything else.
Explore exists to close it. Launched in 2025 onto a network that already spans a thousand-plus university partners, it is an AI-powered outreach and intelligence platform still being built in public — the infrastructure is real, but the product experience that makes that infrastructure legible, trustworthy, and genuinely useful to the humans using it is still being written. That is not a caveat. It is the opportunity.
Design at Explore sits at the exact point where product ambition meets human comprehension. Every dashboard, every recommendation surface, every workflow a university administrator or a counselor touches is either building trust in the system or quietly eroding it. There is no legacy interface to inherit and no established pattern library to lean on uncritically — the structures, the flows, and the design language itself are still being defined, and this role has a direct hand in defining them.
You will own the design craft behind Explore's product experience — the systems, the flows, and the day-to-day partnership with product and engineering that turns a data platform into something universities actually want to open every day.
What Makes This Role Different
Most product design roles at this level ask you to execute inside a design system someone else already built. This one asks you to help build it. Explore's product surface — from university-facing dashboards to the outreach and intelligence tooling underneath them — is young enough that foundational decisions about structure, pattern, and interaction model are still live, and the person in this seat will shape a meaningful share of them.
The Manifest ecosystem gives that work a head start no standalone competitor has. Explore's design language does not need to be invented in a vacuum — Cialfo and BridgeU have already spent years learning what counselors, school staff, and students actually need from an interface under real operational pressure, and Kaaiser's counseling experience adds a further layer of insight into how people make high-stakes education decisions. You inherit that pattern knowledge and get to decide what actually transfers to a university-facing, AI-native product, and what doesn't.
This is also, deliberately, a build-stage role rather than a maintenance one. The decisions made in Explore's product design over the next year or two will be the ones later designers inherit as convention. Joining now means those foundational calls are still yours to make.
What You Own
The Explore product design language
Own the design system and pattern library that Explore's product surfaces are built on, and keep it current as the product evolves
Define interaction models for genuinely new problems — AI-driven outreach and intelligence tooling that does not have an obvious off-the-shelf pattern to borrow
Translate what works in Cialfo's and BridgeU's counselor-facing experience into what a university-facing AI platform actually needs
Product delivery, end to end
Partner with product managers and engineers from early concept through shipped code on every major release, not just at the handoff points
Turn ambiguous hypotheses about what universities need into concrete, testable product experiences
Ensure design decisions are documented well enough that engineering can build against them with minimal back-and-forth
Research and validation
Run evaluative research and usability testing to pressure-test problem definitions before they become roadmap commitments
Build the case for design decisions using evidence, not instinct alone, and be ready to defend that case in front of product and engineering leadership
Design culture and mentorship
Coach and mentor other designers on the team, raising the bar for craft across the function, not just within your own projects
Advocate for user-centred design inside and outside the Explore team, including with stakeholders who are not naturally design-literate
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Explore's product design function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat — these are directional, not fixed.
In the first months, success looks like a clear point of view: a working knowledge of Explore's current design patterns, where they hold up and where they don't, and an honest read on which parts of the product experience are quietly confusing the people who use it every day. You should be able to name, specifically, what needs to change and why.
By the middle of your first year, things should be measurably better. Design decisions should be landing in shipped product faster, with less rework, because the collaboration model with product and engineering is tighter than it was. The design system should be more coherent than it was when you started, and the designers you're mentoring should be doing sharper work because of it.
Longer term, success looks like a design language and a way of working that outlasts your day-to-day involvement — patterns other designers reach for by default because they're genuinely the right answer, not because they're what's already there. The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You've spent the better part of five years as a product designer, and you've built more than one tech product — mobile and desktop — from something close to a blank page rather than only refining what already existed. You know the difference between those two kinds of work, and you've chosen, more than once, to do the harder one.
Your commercial and product instinct is sharp enough that you don't need someone else to translate a business problem into a design problem for you. Given a rough hypothesis and a real user pain point, you can turn it into wireframes, flows, and a testable prototype without waiting for a fully specified brief — and you're just as comfortable running the usability testing that tells you whether your first instinct was actually right.
You're genuinely fluent in the craft: you understand usability principles and human-computer interaction deeply enough to defend a design decision on its merits, not just on taste, and your visual design work reflects real sensitivity to how a system and a user actually interact, not just how a screen looks in isolation. Some working knowledge of front-end implementation — HTML, SASS, CSS, React — helps you have sharper conversations with engineering, even if it isn't the core of the job.
You've mentored other designers before, and you think of that as part of the craft, not a distraction from it. You read pushback from a product manager or an engineer not as an obstacle but as a normal part of getting to the right answer, and you can hold your ground on a design decision while still being genuinely open to being wrong.
Somewhere underneath the craft and the process, you care about who's actually on the other end of the interface — a counselor trying to make a good call under pressure, a student trying to understand an unfamiliar system, a university team trying to trust a recommendation enough to act on it.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Explore is building and your first reaction was not "this sounds like a good design job." It was closer to: the system doesn't exist yet, and I know how to build the right one. That's the person this role is for.
Why Manifest
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility — connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 50+ countries. Our portfolio spans Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, design is the layer that decides whether Explore's underlying intelligence actually gets used. A university that doesn't trust or understand what it's looking at won't act on even the best recommendation — which means the design decisions made here directly determine how much of Explore's data advantage ever converts into a real outcome for a student.
Explore is part of Manifest Global — a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.