---
title: 'Principal Product Designer at Outsmart'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-product-designer-outsmart-lehi-49dqsw1p937v'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Principal Product Designer at Outsmart

- **Company:** Outsmart
- **Location:** Lehi, UT
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outsmart/b6cef6a1-90da-4ea2-894e-93a30083ed35

## Job description

Outsmart is a mission-driven, early-stage startup reimagining higher education for the age of AI by creating an entirely new collegiate experience that expands access and opportunity. Backed by $38M from top venture firms including Khosla Ventures, Forerunner, DST Global Partners, and Lightspeed, the company is led by former Duolingo executives and a founding team that also includes Emmy Award winners. With a strong culture centered around high-impact, detail-oriented team members, Outsmart is already seeing significant traction, generating 1–5 million weekly organic views on social media.

## WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING

As a Principal Product Designer at Outsmart, you’ll help shape an entirely new kind of college experience from the ground up. You’ll lead design for major areas of the product, working closely with Product, Engineering, and leadership to turn complex problems into simple, intuitive, and delightful experiences for students.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll spend most of your time designing, prototyping, and shipping, while also helping guide other designers, raise the quality bar, and evolve how the design team works as Outsmart grows.

## WHO YOU ARE

- Experienced product designer and design leader who has shipped exceptional consumer products and managed other designers
- Combines strong product thinking with excellent visual and interaction design skills
- Comfortable moving between big-picture product strategy and the smallest details of an interaction
- Gives clear, constructive feedback, develops designers, and creates an environment where great work can happen
- Comfortable with ambiguity, moves quickly, and brings structure to problems without adding unnecessary process
- Genuinely curious about AI, actively using new tools to prototype, explore, and rethink how products and design teams can work

## WHAT YOU’LL OWN

- Lead end-to-end design for major areas of the Outsmart student experience
- Turn ambiguous product problems into clear strategies, flows, prototypes, and polished experiences
- Partner closely with Product and Engineering from early exploration through launch and iteration
- Mentor and manage designers, helping them grow while raising the quality of their work
- Lead critiques and create a culture of thoughtful, direct, and productive feedback
- Help establish design processes that allow a small team to move quickly and maintain a high quality bar
- Use research, data, experimentation, and rapid prototyping to inform product decisions
- Evolve Outsmart’s design system and overall product language
- Help grow the design team and shape its culture as the company scales

## WHAT HELPS YOU SUCCEED

- 8+ years of product design experience, with significant experience designing consumer-facing digital products
- Previous experience managing and developing product designers
- A portfolio demonstrating exceptional product thinking, interaction design, and visual craft
- Experience owning complex products or major product areas from strategy through launch
- A strong track record of shipping products used by real customers at meaningful scale
- Excellent Figma and prototyping skills, with a willingness to stay deeply hands-on
- Strong collaboration with Product and Engineering, including comfort navigating technical and business constraints
- Experience using AI tools to accelerate design, prototyping, and exploration
- Strong communication skills and the ability to influence product direction across disciplines
- High standards for craft paired with the judgment to know when to ship and iterate
- A low-ego approach to leadership, collaboration, critique, and feedback
- Bonus: experience with consumer education, social, gaming, or other highly engaging products

Salary Range: $175,000–$225,000.

## Perks

- Competitive salary, equity, and benefits
- Healthcare for you and your dependents (medical, dental, and vision)
- Parental leave for any full-time employee (birthing, non-birthing, and adoptive parents)
- 15 PTO days per year, a winter break, and 12+ paid company holidays per year
- Remote work days
- Lunch provided in-office daily
- Working with super talented people who want to make a difference in the world

Outsmart is committed to building an equitable and inclusive workplace and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants for employment regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

## About Outsmart

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outsmart is building the university of the future by reimagining higher education for the AI era, making it more affordable, accessible, and personalized.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage, raised $26M+ in total)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA with additional offices in New York, New York and Lehi, Utah
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Jorge Mazal (CEO), Daniel Falabella (CPO), Gina Gotthilf (CMO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Education Technology (EdTech) / Higher Education
- **Target Customers**: B2C – students and lifelong learners seeking an alternative to traditional, debt-heavy college education
- **Mission / Purpose**: To dramatically increase access to higher education in a way that is unprecedented and can change the world. The founders aim to make college-level education a basic, universal human right.

## Products & Services
- **Outsmart Platform (In Development)**: A mobile-first, AI-powered learning experience that aims to replace or supplement traditional college. Details are still under wraps (stealth mode), but it involves content generation at scale, gamification, benchmarking, multi-modal behavior classification, and psychometrically valid assessments. The offering is expected to be a more affordable, personalized, and engaging alternative to lectures and student debt.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$26M+** (Seed rounds in 2024 and 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Khosla Ventures (lead), DST Global (lead), Forerunner (lead), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Latitud, Abstract Ventures, Reach Capital, Karman Ventures, 20VC, and angel investors including Lenny Rachitsky (ex-Airbnb).
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **+190% YoY** to 23 employees (as of mid-2025); has 21+ active job postings; monthly web traffic growing.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founding Team Moat**: Led by three former Duolingo executives (CPO, CMO, and CEO) who were instrumental in scaling that platform to hundreds of millions of users. They bring deep expertise in gamification, growth, and product-led learning.
- **Strong Financial Backing**: $26M+ raised from top-tier venture capital firms in a short period, signaling high confidence in the team and vision.
- **AI-Native DNA**: The product is being built from the ground up for the age of AI, focusing on personalized, adaptive learning at scale.
- **Mission-Driven Focus**: Targeting the massive, broken $1.6 trillion US student loan market with a clear, compelling value proposition: high-quality, affordable higher education.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product Development**: Building and launching the core AI-powered learning platform and mobile apps (iOS/Android).
- **Hiring**: Aggressively scaling the team, particularly in Engineering (Senior Applied AI, Senior Mobile, Full-stack), Product (Principal PM), Learning Design (Senior Learning Designers, Faculty Leads), and Academics (Head of Academics, Lead Assessment Developers).
- **Content & Curriculum**: Developing high-quality, science-based learning content and valid assessment systems to ensure academic credibility.
- **Market Entry**: Moving from stealth mode to a public launch, targeting students frustrated with the cost and format of traditional higher education.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Caliber Team**: Join a tight-knit, ambitious team of former Duolingo, Amazon, Meta, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Spotify engineers, product managers, and designers.
- **Big Mission**: The opportunity to work on a world-changing problem—reimagining higher education and solving the student debt crisis.
- **Ownership & Impact**: Early-stage company where employees are given real ownership over key features and products (0→1).
- **Culture**: Described as having "big mission energy," "AI in our DNA," and a "ship, a lot" mentality. Focus on craft and solving complex problems.
- **Work Policy**: On-site / office-first. Employees work from physical offices in San Francisco, New York, or Lehi, Utah.
- **Benefits**: Great benefits and perks, though specific details are not publicly listed. The company values real ownership and the chance to create something that truly matters.
- **Tech Stack**: Python, React, React Native, Swift, UIKit, GraphQL, Rive, Unity, and various ML/MLOps tools.

## Sources
1. [joinoutsmart.com (Company Website)](https://joinoutsmart.com/)
2. [LinkedIn Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outsmart-college)
3. [TechCrunch - Ex-Duolingo execs raise $13M](https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/18/ex-duolingo-execs-raise-13m-to-launch-startup-democratize-access-to-college-education/)
4. [Built In - Outsmart Careers](https://builtin.com/company/outsmart)
5. [Abstract Ventures - Jobs at Outsmart](https://jobs.abstractvc.com/jobs/outsmart)

## Other roles at Outsmart

- [Senior Learning Designer, Science](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-learning-designer-science-outsmart-lehi-tq3er826bfht) — Lehi, UT
- [Lead Assessment Developer](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-assessment-developer-outsmart-lehi-ag8ppkzt25k6) — Lehi, UT
- [Senior Applied AI Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-applied-ai-engineer-outsmart-lehi-tcw7kp2baj6p) — Lehi, UT
- [Head of Academics and Learning Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-academics-and-learning-engineering-outsmart-lehi-q277v3x41z9b) — Lehi, UT
- [Faculty Lead & Learning Engineer - Sciences](https://feeny.ai/job/faculty-lead-learning-engineer-sciences-outsmart-lehi-xyz6a0rv5kqp) — Lehi, UT
- [Principal Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-product-designer-new-relic-hyderabad-ryfmqrzrvdzv) — Hyderabad, India
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