Director of Design

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Design to serve as the strategic architect and visionary for InStride Health’s product ecosystem. In this role, you will be responsible for a design vision that harmonizes technical innovation with clinical warmth, ensuring our use of technology and AI remains approachable and supportive to the families and clinicians we serve. By creating scalable design systems and clear guardrails, you will empower our engineering organization to deliver consistent, safe digital experiences that align instinctively with our core design principles. This role reports to the VP of Product, Technology. This is a fully remote position.

Responsibilities

• Define a Vision of Clinical Harmony: Establish a multi-year design roadmap that balances high-tech innovation with "clinical warmth," ensuring that InStride’s digital presence feels supportive and approachable for families and empowering for our team members.
• Operationalize a Design Architecture for Engineering Autonomy: Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to build the scalable systems required to move projects from vision to reality. You will create the robust guardrails that empower engineering teams to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences independently and in line with our core design principles.
• Stewardship of Human-Centered Technology and AI Strategy: Set the interaction principles and emotional guidelines that govern our use of technology and AI, ensuring automated touchpoints are consistently aligned with InStride’s mission of compassionate care.
• Establish Design Principles as Guardrails: Define and socialize the core design principles that serve as the source of truth for the InStride UI, allowing cross-functional partners to make accessible, safe, consistent design decisions at scale.
• Lead a Versatile Design Organization: Set the bar for design talent at InStride, mentoring individuals to act as strategic partners who can seamlessly move between operational and technical systems and human-centered design to deliver intuitive, high-quality experiences.
• Champion a Culture of Evidence: Establish the methodologies and standards for user research and discovery, ensuring that design decisions are grounded in clinical insights, patient feedback, and quantitative product data.
• Operational Stewardship: Own the design organization’s operational strategy, including headcount planning, budgeting for the design tool-stack, and the prioritization of design initiatives against the broader company roadmap.
• Unify the Experience Ecosystem: Partner with Marketing and Growth leadership to ensure a seamless transition between our external brand identity and our internal digital product, maintaining a consistent experience across every touchpoint.

What You Need to Succeed in the Role

• Executive-Level Design Leadership: 8+ years of experience in Product Design, with a proven track record of leading teams through periods of scale and technological transition.
• Systems Thinking & Architecture: Exceptional ability to deconstruct complex healthcare problems into scalable design systems and architectural frameworks that work across multiple product verticals.
• Versatile Experience Leadership: Success in leading design for complex systems that serve a broad range of users—from high-utility professional tools to warm, approachable consumer experiences.
• Operational Innovation: Proven ability to implement modern tools and AI to automate the design-to-code lifecycle, increasing organizational velocity without sacrificing craft or consistency.
• Strategic & Clinical Judgment: The ability to make high-stakes trade-offs between business speed, technical constraints, and clinical safety, always grounded in deep user empathy.
• Organizational Influence & Advocacy: Proven ability to build deep, high-trust relationships with senior leadership to secure organizational alignment and buy-in for a long-term design vision.
• Health Tech Mission Alignment: Prior experience in a clinical or regulated health tech environment is highly preferred, with a deep understanding of how design quality correlates to patient trust and safety, including HIPAA compliance, data privacy standards, and WCAG accessibility requirements.

The expected annual salary for this role is between $157,000-$175,000. Actual starting salary will be determined on an individualized basis and will be based on several factors including but not limited to specific skill set, work experience, etc. In addition to base compensation, this role offers a target performance-based bonus.