UI/UX Designer (R&D)

Learncap Academy; Udupi district; Hybrid; INR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Real ownership

Direct PM access

Five surfaces product

AI-assisted workflows

Growth opportunities

Job summary

Kalpla invites a product designer to join our design team, owning the process from framing problems to shipping features across five surfaces. You will drive research, define solutions, and push for accessible, scalable UI across web and native platforms.

You will collaborate with PMs, engineers and stakeholders, champion AI-assisted workflows, and shape a cohesive design system that maintains brand integrity and consistency across Kalpla's offerings.

Qualifications

• 2–3 years designing digital products, with at least one shipped feature.
• Advanced Figma skills: components, variants, auto layout, variables, interactive prototypes.
• Strong visual fundamentals and ability to work inside an existing brand.

Responsibilities

• Research and definition: turn one-line briefs into defensible design decisions.
• End-to-end design: IA, flows, wireframes, high-fidelity screens and prototypes for web/mobile/native.
• Extend and strengthen our design system to stay consistent across five surfaces.
• Developer handoff: clean files, tokens, and documented states (empty/loading/error/success).
• QA follow-up: monitor shipped design vs. original decisions and learn from usage.

Skills

Product design

Figma advanced

Responsive design

Prototyping

AI-assisted design

Tools

Figma

Figma Make

Figma AI features

Job description

About Kalpla

Kalpla is an online education platform. We build the software that learners, instructors and institutions actually use every day: courses, live classes, assessments, mentorship and certification. We run two products side by side:

• Kalpla (mainstream) is our public learning platform: web app, mobile web and a native mobile app.
• Academics is our institutional product, built for diploma programmes and college partners: web app and mobile web.

That is five surfaces. This role exists because we have grown past what one designer can hold, and because we want design to have a real seat at the table rather than being a screen-drawing service at the end of the pipeline.

Why this role is interesting

Most design jobs at this experience level hand you a ticket with the solution already decided, and ask you to make it look nice. This is not that job. Our Product Manager will bring you a feature at the level of "instructors need a way to see how their batch is performing". Everything after that sentence is yours: who the user really is, what problem is actually being solved, what the best-in-class solution looks like, what we should build first and what we should deliberately leave out. You will be expected to disagree with us when the research says we are wrong.

What a typical feature looks like here

1. Our PM shares the high-level intent and the business reason behind it.
2. You research: what users actually do today, what the best products in this space do, what our data says.
3. You come back with a recommendation and the reasoning, including the options you rejected and why.
4. We align as a team, then you design it properly.
5. You hand off with a prototype and specs, stay available through the build, and review the result.

We want your reasoning in step 3 more than we want pixels in step 4.

Roles and responsibilities

• Research and definition: take a one-line brief and turn it into a defensible design decision using competitor teardowns, user interviews, support ticket patterns and product analytics.
• End-to-end design: information architecture, user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity screens and interactive prototypes for web, mobile web and native mobile.
• Our design system: extend and strengthen our existing brand colours, typography and patterns so all five surfaces stay consistent.
• Developer handoff: clean Figma files, named layers, defined tokens, and documented states (empty, loading, error, success, offline).
• Closing the loop: sit in on QA, review what shipped against what you designed, and watch real usage to see whether your decision worked.

Preferred candidate profile

Core craft

• 2 to 3 years designing digital products, with at least one product taken from vague idea to shipped and used
• Advanced Figma: components, variants, auto layout, variables and modes, interactive prototyping, Dev Mode handoff
• Strong visual fundamentals: typographic hierarchy, spacing and grids, colour, and the discipline to work inside an existing brand
• Responsive and adaptive design, plus native iOS and Android patterns
• Prototyping and interaction design: transitions, states and micro-interactions

Research and thinking

• Comfortable running lightweight research: interviews, usability tests, surveys, competitive analysis
• Able to read product analytics and funnels, and let the numbers change your mind
• Information architecture for multi-role systems (learner, instructor, admin)
• UX writing: labels, empty states, error messages and onboarding copy

AI-assisted design

• Hands-on with Claude for design work: exploring directions, iterating on UI concepts, pressure-testing decisions, and turning research into structure quickly
• Familiar with AI design and prototyping tools (Figma Make, Figma AI features, v0 or similar)
• Sensible about where AI output helps and where it quietly produces something inconsistent, inaccessible or off-brand

Working with engineers

• A working understanding of what is cheap and expensive to build, and roughly how React, Next.js and React Native behave
• Accessibility as a default: WCAG AA contrast, touch targets, keyboard navigation, screen readers
• Designing for the unglamorous cases: slow networks, small screens, long Indian names, empty dashboards, failed payments
• Clear written communication, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to defend a decision and drop it gracefully when someone brings better reasoning

Nice to have

• EdTech experience, or any product with multiple user roles and permissions
• Design systems at scale, particularly tokens shared across web and native
• Motion design (Rive, Lottie, After Effects), illustration or icon design
• Experience working directly with a Product Manager in a small team, and exposure to design ops

Who this role is probably not right for

• If you prefer receiving detailed specs and executing them precisely, this role will feel unstructured
• If you want a large design team to learn craft from, we are not that yet. You will be one of two designers
• If AI-assisted workflows feel like a threat rather than a tool, we are probably not aligned

Perks and benefits

• Real ownership: your name is on the decision, not just the file
• Direct access to the PM and the Head of Engineering
• Five live surfaces and a product with actual users
• A team genuinely investing in AI-assisted workflows
• Room to grow into a design lead as the team expands

Work model:

On-site in Udupi for the first 45 days, then hybrid.