Senior UI Designer

Trala is a tech-powered online music school. Our mission is to make world-class music education accessible to every single person on Earth.

Right now, music education is so expensive that the joy of music is available only to the rich and urban. Imagine instead a world where all 4 billion people who will pick up an instrument in the next 30 years could get a world-class education. Imagine how much more music and joy there would be in the world. That is the future we’re obsessed with creating.

Our first product, Trala: Learn Violin, is a mobile application that teaches anyone how to play violin. We do this using movie-quality tutorial videos featuring diverse violinists, signal processing that listens to students play their real violins and gives instant feedback on every mistake, and a curriculum that prioritizes accessibility and diversity. This is crazy-hard and requires us to solve novel problems in signal processing, app design, user psychology, and education theory.

Over the last 3 years, we have organically grown Trala to 250,000 downloads, students in 100+ countries, and support from some of the most celebrated musicians in the world. Our students are ages 7 to 70 and live in rural Montana, Lebanon, tiny Pacific islands, Hong Kong, and our hometown of Chicago. They’re not businesses or governments, they’re people. They’ve dreamt of learning an instrument for years and we’re fulfilling those dreams.

In the next 18 months, we will:

• Roll out new instruments in new languages.
• Build a community so students can play together and help each other.
• Create an educational curriculum that gets better with every new student we add.
• Unleash our students’ creativity by allowing them to create their own content.

It’s going to be a massive challenge. That’s where you come in.

We’re a fully remote team headquartered in Chicago. This is a fully remote position.

About the role

You will be the second designer on the team. You will own the visual design for everything user-facing at Trala, including our mobile apps, website, and marketing materials.

Ever look at a brand or a product and think, "If I were the designer this would be so much better"? In this role, you'll have complete ownership over Trala's visual designs.

Your mission will be to engage users with appealing user interfaces that are consistent with the Trala design style and branding. You will be involved in the entire product life cycle, working closely with our UX Designer, Product Manager, and CEO to identify, research and provide high-standard designs for a variety of projects. You will be the final design eye on anything that goes live to our students.

Requirements:

1. 3+ years UI experience working on B2C products, with a preference for mobile apps.
2. Excellent visual design skills.
3. Expert proficiency in interaction design, information architecture, and visual design.
4. Proven experience designing mobile-first experiences and responsive web experiences.
5. Strong understanding of design principles and user-centered design methodologies.
6. Proficient using design technologies like Figma, Sketch, and After Effects to create high-fidelity mockups, illustrations, and animations.
7. Knowledge of component libraries and design systems for mobile apps.
8. Deep empathy for the journey of each individual student.
9. Action-oriented. Moves with purpose, urgency, and adventure.
10. Hands-on. Willing and eager to learn new skills to help out the team. Doesn’t view any task as “below” or “above” them.
11. Creative. Able to come up with truly new ideas and be self-directed.
12. Accountable. High standards for team productivity.
13. Excellent organization and communication skills. Likes details. If you’ve read this whole thing, you might be a fit.

Benefits

• You’ll make an immediate impact on the team with a high degree of creative freedom.
• You’ll be paid well, have free medical/dental/vision, and work with people who love their jobs.
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the LinkedIn, Duolingo, and Figma CEOs. These folks are leaders in design and are our mentors. They will be your mentors too.
• Trala deeply impacts peoples’ lives all across the world. These are dreams you’ll be fulfilling. Not “leveraged data monetization” or whatever value Facebook claims to provide these days.
• Trala is funded by amazing people like the LinkedIn and Duolingo CEOs. These folks are leaders in education & growth and are our mentors. They will be your mentors, too.
• Trala prioritizes diversity, inclusion, and righting economic and social wrongs. We strive to make our corner of the world a better place.
• Read up about our team at https://trala.com/about.
• Trala supports its team in their own personal education. We have unique benefits such as reimbursing up to $1000 a year for music lessons.