Remote Course Director: UX, UI, and AI at IxDF

You’ve been designing long enough to have watched tools become essential and then disappear. You know which design skills are timeless and which ones expire. The human-centered design skills are where your heart is, and you know that AI will take over much of the tool-based design work soon.

You see the fear around AI, and you understand where it comes from. But you also see the opportunities, and you want to show people how to work with AI in a way that benefits their lives, their users, and the world.

You can name the ten leading designers who should be teaching the world’s best courses and Master Classes right now. You know what each of them does better than anyone else, and where their gaps are.

Now you get the opportunity to decide what hundreds of thousands of designers learn next.

The industry leaders whose expertise you’ll be turning into courses and Master Classes include Don Norman and Vitaly Friedman, as well as Design Leads at Netflix, LinkedIn, Meta, and Adobe. Don Norman also chairs our executive board.

You’ll be involved in the entire process of creating our courses and Master Classes, and you’ll lead many of the decisions, so there are incredible opportunities for you to take initiative, make meaningful contributions, and grow. Forget political struggles or long, pointless debates. You’ll be in a team with minimal distance between idea and action, where decisions are made ultra-fast.

Join the Global Leader in Online Design and AI Education

IxDF is the global leader in online UX/UI design and AI education. We hold the trust of industry giants like Adobe, NASA, and IBM, who rely on our courses to train their teams. Prestigious universities, including MIT and the University of Cambridge, integrate our material into their curricula. Help us take online education to new heights and make a meaningful impact on humankind.

At IxDF, we’re not just a company but a movement dedicated to making high-quality design and AI education accessible to everyone, everywhere.

We’ve pioneered online design education since 2002. We have over 1,150,000 enrollments and 1,583 company members, with more than 40 courses, 160 Master Classes, and thousands of open-source design resources, created by our team in collaboration with 240 industry leaders.

With learners from over 100 countries, your work will empower people worldwide.

We’re Hiring Three People for Our Editorial Team

We’re growing, and three roles are open at the same time to build the next generation of our core educational product. Here’s what each role leads on:

• Our Course Directors, UX, UI, and AI: lead what we teach and who teaches our courses and Master Classes. You reach out to industry leaders and create the invitation they say yes to. You bring your judgment to a planned course outline: what’s missing, what doesn’t belong, and whether the structure is solid. You plan and shoot courses with our Education Designers. This is the role described here.

• Our Education Designers, UX, UI, and AI: lead how design and AI are taught. You plan, structure, and create the core content, and you decide what a course participant should be able to do by the end and how they get there.

• Our Course Writers and Editors: lead how our courses and articles read. You make each title engaging, ensure each sentence flows, and edit the written course experience from the user’s perspective.

We’re a flexible team, and you’ll be able to do what you excel in. Everyone on our team creates courses, and everyone works across these roles. If you’re torn between two roles, apply for the one you’d be best at, and tell us in your application which other one you considered and why.

You, the Course Director, decide what belongs in our curriculum and who should teach it. You reach out to the world’s leading experts, plan the courses with them, and shoot courses with them. When an Education Designer brings you a course outline, you’re the one who says what’s missing, what doesn’t belong, and how to optimize the learning outcome so designers can succeed today. You’ll work closely with our Co-Founder, your Team Lead, our other Course Directors, and the Education Designers, and you’ll plan and create courses alongside them. Our Course Writers and Editors take the finished material the last mile: the scripts, hooks, headings, on-screen text in videos, quiz wording, and editorial voice. You’ll also work closely with the video team and our growth team.

Your Role at IxDF

• Be a core part of our Editorial Team. You’ll collaborate with IxDF editors, video editors, and UX and UI designers as well as external industry leaders to create courses and Master Classes for people worldwide. You’ll help them succeed in the age of AI with new skills in AI and in timeless human-centered design.

• You’ll research what already exists in a topic area, so that what we build is genuinely unique. You’ll look at where design and AI are heading, what designers need that nobody has taught well yet, and what we should retire because the field has already moved on.

• Find the people who should teach it. You decide a topic is worth a course, you work out who should teach it and why, you write the email, and you get the yes. Then you plan the content with the industry leader and agree what the course must leave a learner able to do.

• Decide what each expert should teach. The best designers know a great deal, and a course that tries to capture all of it becomes an information dump. You develop a point of view on what a designer genuinely needs from them, and you hold the course to it.

• You’ll decide which skills our courses teach, both to people entering design and to experienced designers leveling up. Our goal is to help designers thrive in the age of AI and work responsibly, so their users can thrive too.

• Ensure our course participants finish each course with a solid portfolio project they can show a hiring manager.

• Help us decide what AI should do for our course participants. Personalized learning paths, constructive AI feedback on portfolio work, practice environments where people run real design tasks and get feedback. You’ll also help us improve the user flows on our own platform, so that learning at IxDF is as well designed as what we teach. You’ll work on this with our founders, designers, and dev team.

• Make an impact as you pressure-test the courses our Education Designers plan. An Education Designer sends you a course outline, and you read it against everything you know about the field and about how people learn design, then give constructive feedback on what’s missing, what doesn’t belong, and where the structure can be improved. You know the limits of your own expertise, and you research your way past them before you weigh in. You’ll also plan, structure, and create courses yourself, alongside them.

• You’re one of the people whose judgment the rest of the team leans on. You show our Education Designers what ten or twenty years in the field taught you to look for. In return, our Co-Founder, your Team Lead, and our other Course Directors give constructive feedback on the courses you lead. You’ll work in a diverse, highly organized, result-driven environment where you’ll grow personally and professionally.

• Act as guardian of our quality bar. When a course goes out under our name, it has to be better than anything else available on the topic. On the courses and Master Classes you lead or review, you’re the one who spots what’s not good enough yet and works with the team to fix it.

• Bring your subject matter expertise to our writers, community managers, and social media team, so our design thinking stays consistent across everything we publish.

• You help produce Master Classes. We produce 3 per month. Over email, you reach out to designers whose work you admire, invite them to create one with us, plan the content, and produce the live session. Timelines vary enormously: with Don Norman or Vitaly Friedman it can be two weeks from first email to publication, because we work with them often. With a new expert, it can be half a year. Once the session is recorded, you get the footage and the transcript, and you decide with the Education Designers and Team Lead which existing course benefits from which snippets, and where they go.

• Focus on what matters as you take raw expert video material, course and Master Class transcripts and footage featuring global industry leaders, and turn it into educational material that teaches new skills in AI and in timeless human-centered design. You’ll work across UX design, human-computer interaction, design thinking, UI design, psychology, and AI.

• Design for a diverse, global audience. Some of our courses and Master Classes serve working designers who want to grow into more senior work. Others serve people moving into design from other fields. Often, a course will serve both in the same lesson. Getting both right without watering either down is a rewarding design challenge.

• Give the video team constructive feedback on course and Master Class videos, from on-screen text and b-roll to graphics and animation, so each video is engaging to learn from and accurate from a design perspective.

• Fly out and meet the global industry leaders in design in professional studios across the world. You’ll shoot the course content there with some of your colleagues. Expect this a few times a year at minimum. Some of us love that part and join every studio production; others keep it to those few trips. Both work for us. On average we shoot 4-6 new courses per year.

• Expect to have several courses moving at once at different stages: one you’re planning with an expert, one being shot, one in production, and one published course that you’re reviewing and improving.

• Find room for improvement by looking at completion rates, learner feedback, and the portfolios course participants produce, then go back and fix what isn’t excellent yet. Use the power of incremental, modular design as you help push the quality of our educational materials to new heights, surpassing even the very best in industry and academia. We’re always learning, always improving, always raising the bar in everything we do and ship.

• Maintain and improve our crystal-clear documentation so our knowledge resources stay up-to-date, easy to find, and provide instant value to our internal teams. Clarity is key. Any line of documentation should be self-explanatory.

• We’re proud to have assembled a remarkable team of unicorns who uplift, motivate, and push each other to excel daily. There’s a seat open for someone who shares our passion for excellence. Could that be you?

About You

• You have at least 10 years of hands-on design experience. Thirty is not too many.

• You have a network among designers you respect, and you’re comfortable writing to someone you admire and presenting them with an opportunity.

• You know what the design community wants to see, and what it needs to learn.

• You’re kind, and you have the social intelligence and empathy to engage well with very different kinds of people. Much of this job is convincing busy, accomplished people that what we’re building is worth their time.

• You can show us something you built or led: a product, a design team, a course, an AI teaching app, or a conference track. We’re excited to hear what it was, your thinking behind it, how long it took you to create, what went wrong, and how you improved it.

• You can take a broad, complex design practice and turn it into a step-by-step learning sequence that’ll make a beginner feel and act confident. You can look at a plan for teaching something and see what’s missing before anyone builds it.

• You’re a practical idealist. You know how to create great results through incremental quick wins and MVPs, and you know when to go all in and make something perfect.

• You’re a forward thinker who isn’t afraid to innovate and try new things before others have.

• You collaborate with AI in everything you do. You use AI to research, structure, write, and create faster, and you know how to take human leadership, so the outcome is 100% yours and better than you could have created without AI.

• You’re eager to help people build UX and UI skills because you know they’re more relevant than ever in the age of AI.

• You can teach a career changer the powerful skills of great design, and you can guide an experienced designer in upskilling. Perhaps you’ve mentored people, or you’ve run your own company helping clients level up.

• You give constructive feedback people can act on, and you can tell a talented colleague how they can improve their work without them becoming defensive.

• You’re genuinely curious about how AI is changing design work and design education.

• You’re fluent in written and spoken English and you can explain complex ideas clearly.

• You’re enthusiastic about learning by doing and are committed to putting in the effort to continuously improve your skills.

• You spot problems before anyone else notices them, and when something goes off track you come back with a solution rather than a report.

• You value teamwork, prioritize collaboration, and focus on collective goals and harmony in the workplace.

• You’re self-motivated, and you love creative freedom, independent judgment, and the responsibility that comes with both.

• You’re driven by the desire to make a positive impact in the world and to improve the lives of others.

• If you still love designing in Figma and building interfaces with AI, there’s room for that here. Some of our Course Directors design hands-on; others have moved fully into direction. Both work for us.

• Most of the work happens from your home office, but you’re willing to travel a few times a year to shoot courses.

• You’re located in a time zone between UTC-6 (Austin, Chicago) and UTC+8 (Singapore, Perth), which includes all of Europe.

Bonus Points

None of these are required, but each of them would make us even happier.

• You’ve led a design team.

• You publish your own thinking on design: articles, a book, educational material, a blog, or a social media presence.

• You’ve spoken at design conferences, or you’re on a first-name basis with people who do.

• You’ve created design systems. Organizing complex material so other people can put it to use is a lot of what you’ll be doing.

• You’ve worked as an editor, or you’ve created online courses.

• You have the graphic design skills to create image-based and interactive content for courses, articles, and social media.

• You’ve built AI-supported learning tools yourself, or you’ve used AI to build products.

• You hold a bachelor’s or master’s degree in UX, UI, HCI, AI, or a similar field.

• You’ve collaborated with video production teams.

What We Can Offer

• A highly valued role: You’ll shape our core product, our courses and Master Classes.

• Reach and impact that are difficult to find anywhere else in this field. A design leader might shape the work of thirty people on their team. Your decisions about what we teach will reach hundreds of thousands. They’ll build better careers and design a better world for all of us.

• Access: the designers you’d normally see on a conference stage are the people you’ll email, plan with, and sit across from in a studio. Our name opens doors. An email from IxDF gets read, so the reach you have now is the floor, not the ceiling.

• Autonomy: Nobody will ever hand you a template and tell you to fill it in.

• A global, purpose-driven team: work remotely alongside passionate professionals from all over the world, united by a common mission to create the best possible design and AI education in the world and make it accessible for everyone.

• Our co-founder and co-CEO, Rikke, will work closely with you. She and our other co-founder, Mads, built IxDF from nothing, with no investment capital, so we would stay free to make world-class design education affordable to everyone. She was the sole editor and video editor for many of our early years, so she’s shaped our course planning, expert interviews, video shoots, and content editing from the inside. She’s still hands-on in everything we do, and she still films educational videos herself, in places like the US, the North Pole, and Nepal.

• A full-time position within a fully remote organization. Video-based collaboration with your colleagues from elsewhere on the planet, and we get together in person each year, on a team trip or for a studio production.

• Bi-weekly knowledge-sharing sessions and 4 meeting-free days weekly for focused work.

• A work culture with no fluffy titles, political agendas, or corporate drama. Your colleagues value your warm character, your strong work ethic, and the results you deliver. If you embody old-school virtues of always striving to deliver results, learn and become better every day, you’ll thrive at IxDF.

• A daily mission to help impact, empower, and enrich the lives of millions of people by creating affordable high-end design education for everyone across the planet. It’ll be yours too.

• Colleagues with four to forty years of experience, and a culture where we follow the best idea, not the longest résumé.

• A company where the distance between idea and execution is minimal. We’re a highly agile organization with zero bureaucracy or corporate politics – and with exceptional order and efficiency.

• A company culture where passion meets high performance and excellence. To help us improve the world, and yourself in the process, you’ll need grit, strong work ethic, long-term thinking, and self-discipline.

• We thrive because we have a hands-on attitude and a bias towards action as opposed to fluff-filled, unrealistic strategies. You’ll need crisp execution skills yourself and the ability to impress your colleagues with concrete results, just like they’ll impress you.

• We built online design education before people believed in it. AI is now changing what designers do, and they carry a bigger responsibility than ever. You’ll be at the forefront of teaching designers to work with AI and to design responsibly for it. You’ll help set a direction that shapes both the designers we teach and the people who use what they build. Together, we’ll design a better world.

How to Learn More and Apply