Start Date: As soon as possible
Possible Locations: New York, NY | Newark, NJ
Braven:
In America, we’ve promised that hard work and ambition will be met with equality of opportunity. The reality is that we have a quiet crisis on our hands. Despite 1.2 million low-income or first-generation students enrolling in college each year, only one in four will attain a strong first job or enroll in graduate school upon graduating.
The Braven Accelerator empowers promising young people on their path to college graduation, meaningful careers, and lives of impact. Alongside educational institutions, Braven provides a scalable model to discover, develop, and connect extraordinary, diverse, and driven young people to high-quality skill-building opportunities and networks. From the Accelerator will come a generation of leaders as diverse as our future demands.
To date, 69% of Braven’s Fellows have landed a strong job within 12 months of graduation, as compared with an average of 54% for all students nationally. Braven Fellows outpace their peers in internship attainment, non-cognitive skill growth, and college persistence. Braven currently operates in New York City, Newark, NJ, Chicago, IL, and San Jose, CA, and is launching in New York City. We aim to become the nation’s leading accelerator of diverse talent, putting emerging leaders on the pathway to college completion and economic mobility. Our work is highly data-driven around the outcomes of college graduation, workforce readiness skills-based proficiency, and employment in a high impact role within six months of graduation.
We believe Braven is a solution and we are on a mission to scale it, equalizing access to the American Dream.
The Role:
The user experience is at the heart of everything we do and create at Braven. We are seeking an experienced UX/UI designer who will be endlessly curious about the needs of our students, volunteers, and staff, hold the vision for how various users experience and love our products, and deliver meaningful solutions that are effective, scalable, inspiring, and beautiful. You will play a critical role in improving the Braven program experience by creating, testing, and refining intuitive, accessible, and easy-to-use interfaces for our online learning platform, web-based facilitation guides, tools for content designers, staff and volunteers, and the Braven website. You will work on a small core team of product and tech team members and will help create the product roadmap.
This role is for you if you love contributing to an important mission, do everything you can to learn about the behaviors, attitudes, and emotions of our users, have a knack for making things delightfully beautiful and better, and the stomach for the evolving and wide-ranging needs of a growing but lean start-up organization. As the only UX/UI designer on our team, you must be excited about being the singular leader of this work at Braven, are a natural self-starter, and can manage up effectively.
To be successful at Braven, on the Product Team, and in this role, you must demonstrate Braven’s core values, be comfortable with ambiguity and adapting to frequent change, and welcome constant feedback and learning. We are a team that likes each other both in and outside of work. Do you have a strong bias to action and enjoy making the complex simple all while driving and owning all aspects of your projects from conception to completion? Come join us in shaping the next generation of leaders!
Responsibilities:
- Design intuitive, accessible, and easy-to-use visual interfaces across Braven’s web applications
- Build user interface mockups and prototypes
- Create user flows and wireframes based on user research
- Test designs with users and iterate as needed
- Collaborate in lock-step with engineers and content designers to seamlessly deliver products
- Design beautifully branded program materials to ensure the in-person experience is as intuitive and seamless as the online experience
- Conduct user research to inform designs
- Organize user research and track research needs so that we are prioritizing effectively and following through on insights
- Ensure that designs align with Braven style guides and design principles
- Quickly learn organizational and programmatic context to inform designs
- Travel 3-4 times per year for in-person team retreats
Required Experience
- 5+ years professional experience as a UX/UI designer with a strong portfolio of human-centered designs
- Working at a start-up
- Agile project management
- User research and experience translating research into actionable solutions
- Print and graphic design
- Managing up
It’s a bonus if you have experience with:
- Designing for Gen Z students and first-generation, low-income college students of color
- Front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript)
- Indesign
Qualifications:
- Passionate about designing and building things for social good
- Strong cultural competence and experience working with diverse populations
- Proven track record for creating effective, engaging, and beautiful user experiences via online/mobile platforms and improving designs using data and feedback
- Highly motivated, self-directed, results-oriented, data-driven, resourceful, and flexible- you’re a self-starter, manage up effectively, and are able to work as the only UX/UI designer on the team
- Able to build and test quickly
- Extremely curious about our users and our program
- Exceptional design instincts and aesthetic taste
- Seeks, welcomes and demonstrates judgment on design feedback from various stakeholders
- Exceptional and proactive communicator across a range of stakeholders (able to translate work and make it relevant and meaningful to a variety of audiences)
- Creates and follows through on project plans with attention to detail and deadlines
- Effectively prioritizes across multiple projects and prioritizes solutions that address problems (vs choosing solutions based on personal preference)
- Willingness to roll up your sleeves and do what it takes to meet team goals and achieve impact
- Excels in a fast-paced, team-oriented, start-up environment and navigates ambiguity
Total Rewards Philosophy:
Braven is committed to attracting and retaining extraordinary, diverse leaders who believe deeply in our mission and uphold our core values as organizational leaders and stewards within and outside of the organization. Braven provides a “total rewards package” that encompasses benefits, compensation, recognition, and career development. Current benefits include: Braven covers 85% of health care costs, has unlimited vacation time, matches up to 5% of your 401K contribution starting your first full month, a paid sabbatical after 4 years on staff, and competitive base salaries based on the midpoint of the market among not-for-profit organizations of similar size. We believe in compensating staff members fairly in relation to each other, their qualifications, and their impact on behalf of the organization and take internal equity seriously. Staff who are meeting expectations generally receive an annual 3% increase. Braven conducts benchmarking every other year; based on this external data, some salaries may also receive market adjustments to keep pace with relevant competition in similar roles. Braven reserves the right to change benefits at any time.
The salary for this position is competitive and depends on prior work experience.