Jobs at TED
Interaction designer, TED.com
TED.com is a critically acclaimed, award-winning website featuring inspired talks from the world's leading thinkers and doers. Over the last three years, our talks have been watched more than 150 million times worldwide, creating a new category of online content, aimed toward an unusually intelligent and engaged audience. We pride ourselves on combining intelligent, forward-thinking content with leading-edge technology and utterly intuitive design. We're rapidly evolving our website -- which draws several million monthly users, as well as best-of-breed sponsors -- and are looking for a highly experienced, multi-talented interaction designer to join our small, collaborative team.
This role is central to TED's continued success, and we're looking for candidates with experience creating industry-leading, delightfully intuitive, beautifully realized websites. You'll need to be versatile -- with experience on a range of sites/features (online video, database-driven content, community/collaboration tools, social media applications, data visualizations) -- and fluent with the standard tools of the trade, producing wireframes, storyboards and sometimes product specs.
Our team is small and nimble, so you'll need to be both deeply collaborative and extremely self-sufficient -- drawing inspiration and input from teammates, but also working independently and efficiently on your own, without a large support staff.
You'll also need to be:
+ Comfortable in a startup-like environment, where everyone wears multiple hats and priorities regularly shift, to keep pace with rapid industry changes and organization growth
+ Effortlessly collaborative, with an ability to communicate across disciplines, and pull inspiration and solutions from all departments of the organization
+ Articulate about your work and the design decisions you make, but flexible and adaptable when it comes to integrating other's ideas
+ Passionate about user-centered design and well-versed in tools for understanding user behavior (traffic analysis, usability testing, etc)
+ Practical about business concerns, with experience handling the give and take of balancing user needs with business priorities (Though decisions at TED are heavily weighted toward the former)
+ Organized, self-sufficient, and utterly comfortable multi-tasking. You'll need experience setting schedules, reliably hitting deadlines and juggling multiple simultaneous projects
+ Comfortable identifying and managing outside design resources (including visual designers, illustrators, Flash designers, etc)
+ Technologically fluent and current, with a great sense of what's possible
+ Passionate about TED's content, and the prospect of creating a stronger platform to enable the exchange of ideas worldwide
Experience with product development/product management is a plus. A passion for storytelling and a broad interest in the world -- including science/technology, design/architecture, global development, entertainment/arts -- are also big pluses. Also: We only hire extremely nice people.
This is a full-time role, based in TED's downtown New York office. TED is a non-profit, but we offer a competitive package, including full benefits. This role reports into the Executive Producer of TED Media (who in turn reports directly to TED's "Curator"/Executive Director). We'd like you to start yesterday.
To apply, please email jobs@ted.com with INTERACTION DESIGNER in the subject line and include:
+ Cover letter in the body of the email, telling us why you're the right person for this role
+ Resume
+ Portfolio or work samples (Please indicate your specific roles and contributions for each project submitted as part of the portfolio). These can be included as an attachment or a link to a website
++++++
Product development lead, TED.com
TED.com is a critically acclaimed, award-winning website featuring inspired talks from the world's leading thinkers and doers. Over the last three years, our talks have been watched more than 150 million times worldwide, creating a new category of online content, aimed toward an unusually intelligent and engaged audience. We pride ourselves on combining intelligent, forward-thinking content with leading-edge technology and utterly intuitive design. We're rapidly evolving our website -- which draws millions of monthly users, as well as best-of-breed sponsors -- and are looking for an experienced, forward-thinking, deeply collaborative product development lead.
This role is central to TED's continued success, and we're looking for candidates who have developed industry-leading, delightfully intuitive, beautifully realized websites from concept to launch. You'll need to be versatile -- with experience on a range of sites/features (online video, database-driven content, community/collaboration tools, social media applications, data visualization) and comfortable with the tools of the trade (product specs, wireframes, etc).
You'll work with TED's senior management to define priorities, set direction and develop new features, and will lead a collaborative team (blending design, development and subject-matter experts) to execute them. You'll play a key role in idea-generation/conceptualization, but will also set schedules, manage resources, and own the development roadmap. As such, you'll need exceptional communication and organization skills; a collaborative approach; and the ability to absorb and build on our shared vision for what TED.com can become. We expect that you're passionate about web development/design, and well-versed in best practices; we also expect that you're a natural leader who can set direction, communicate clearly across disciplines, and enable a team to produce their best work.
You'll need to be:
+ Comfortable in a start-up like environment, where everyone wears multiple hats and priorities regularly shift, to keep pace with rapid industry changes and organization growth
+ Effortlessly collaborative, with an ability to communicate across disciplines, and pull inspiration and solutions from all departments of the organization
+ Organized, self-sufficient, and utterly comfortable multi-tasking. You'll also need to work independently and efficiently without a large support staff
+ Imaginative and inventive, but also rigorous: capable of fleshing out features and product specs to make sure all the puzzle pieces fit
+ Experienced in creating a lightly structured product-development environment, with protocols for gathering requirements, creating specs, allocating resources; setting schedules; QA; beta testing, etc.
+ Passionate about user-centered design and well-versed in tools for understanding user behavior and quantifying success (traffic analysis, usability testing, etc)
+ Practical about business concerns, and capable of balancing user needs with business priorities (Though decisions at TED are heavily weighted toward the former)
+ Technologically fluent and current, with a great sense of what's possible and an ability to speak "developer"
+ Passionate about TED's content, and the prospect of creating a stronger platform to enable the exchange of ideas worldwide
Experience with interaction design is a plus. A passion for storytelling and a broad interest in the world -- including science/technology, design/architecture, global development, entertainment/arts -- are also big pluses. Also: We only hire extremely nice people.
This is a full-time role, based in TED's downtown New York office. TED is a non-profit, but we offer a competitive package, including full benefits. This role reports into the Executive Producer of TED Media (who in turn reports directly to TED's "Curator"/Executive Director). We'd like you to start yesterday.
To apply, please email jobs@ted.com with the words PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT in the subject. Please include:
+ Cover letter in the body of the email, telling us why you're the right person for this role
+ Resume (PDF, Word docs, web link)
+ Portfolio or work samples (Please indicate your specific roles and contributions for each project submitted as part of the portfolio). These can be included as an attachment or a link.
