Senior Instructional Designer - AI & Simulation Enablement

The Role: As our Senior Instructional Designer, AI & Simulation Enablement, you'll drive our organization's shift toward AI-powered, simulation-based training. You won't just write training content — you'll design, build, and continuously improve realistic practice environments, from conversational role-play scenarios to procedural and technical simulations, that let employees rehearse high-stakes skills safely, repeatedly, and at scale. This role sits deliberately at the intersection of three disciplines: instructional design, live facilitation, and Product/Engineering. You'll translate learning needs into technical requirements that designers or Product and Engineering can build against, and translate those outputs back into the classroom experience for our learners. Success means simulation-based training that is both instructionally sound and technically scalable — and that demonstrably improves performance.

This is a hybrid role based in either New York or Seattle location

What you’ll do:

Simulation Design & Strategy

• Design branching scenarios, role-play conversations, and procedural/technical simulations grounded in adult learning principles and real on-the-job situations.
• Define what “realistic” and “effective” mean for each simulation — personas, difficulty curves, failure states, and feedback loops — in partnership with SMEs and facilitators.
• Build and maintain a simulation roadmap aligned to the organization’s highest-priority skill gaps, rather than defaulting to whichever tool is easiest to deploy.

AI Tooling, Prompt Engineering & Build

• Own the prompt engineering and configuration behind AI-driven simulations (conversational AI role-play, AI-generated scenario content, adaptive difficulty), working within licensed platforms and/or custom-built tools.
• Evaluate and pilot AI simulation vendors and in-house technologies (e.g., conversational role-play platforms, authoring tools with AI generation, avatar/voice tools) against defined learning outcomes and total cost of ownership.
• Maintain a working knowledge of the AI/LLM capabilities and constraints relevant to training use cases, translating this into realistic scope and timelines.

Bridging Instructional Design, Facilitation & Product/Engineering

• Act as the primary liaison between the L&D function and P&E teams building or supporting simulation tooling — writing clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria on the learning side. Serve as a product owner for L&D outcomes.
• Partner with facilitators and trainers to pressure-test simulations before rollout, incorporating live-delivery feedback into design and technical iteration.
• Translate technical/platform constraints (data privacy, integration limits, latency, model behavior) into design trade-offs that instructional design and facilitation stakeholders can understand and plan around.
• Represent L&D in Product/Engineering planning processes where simulation tooling, data, or infrastructure decisions affect training outcomes.

Innovation & Process Ownership

• Pioneer AI-driven design and production processes that let the team scale simulation output while maintaining quality — this role owns how simulations get built, not just what gets built.
• Stay current on emerging AI tools and techniques relevant to simulation and instructional design, and make the call on when to adopt, pilot, or pass.

Measurement & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track success metrics for each simulation (e.g., time-to-competency, skill transfer, manager/coach ratings, performance-data correlation), not just completion or satisfaction scores.
• Use practice and performance analytics to identify where simulations are and aren’t closing real skill gaps, and iterate accordingly.
• Report on simulation program impact to L&D leadership, tying results to business outcomes rather than production speed alone.

Governance & Quality

• Ensure simulations meet accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG, Section 508) and organizational data privacy/security requirements for any AI tool used.
• Establish and maintain a quality/review process for AI-generated simulation content before it reaches learners.

A successful applicant will fit the following criteria:

We want someone who lives at the intersection of learning design and technology. You’ll thrive here if:

• You have 7+ years in instructional design, learning experience design, or a closely related L&D role.
• You have demonstrated experience building with AI to design, develop, and scale learning experiences, including AI-assisted content generation, prompt engineering, content transformation, and workflow optimization — not just general AI familiarity.
• You have demonstrated experience creating AI-generated learning assets, specifically simulations, chatbots, branching scenarios, role-play conversations, assessments, and coaching/reinforcement activities (a portfolio or work samples demonstrating this is required).
• You have experience partnering directly with P&E teams or other technical partners in their planning process, and you communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You have experience designing for and/or delivering live facilitation (virtual or in-person), or working closely with facilitators to pressure-test and shape training content before rollout.
• You have experience translating business priorities and performance gaps into scalable learning solutions, ideally in a fast-paced or customer-facing organization.
• You have a strong grounding in instructional design methodology (e.g., ADDIE, adult learning theory) and scenario/branching-logic design.
• You have working proficiency with at least one AI simulation/role-play platform (e.g., Second Nature, Hyperbound, Mindtickle, Zenarate, SmartWinnr, or comparable) and one standard authoring/content tool stack (e.g., Articulate Storyline/Rise, Vyond, Claude Design) with AI-assisted features.
• You’re familiar with the systems a Product/Engineering-adjacent L&D role needs to operate in: an LMS (e.g., Cornerstone, Absorb, Moodle), a CMS (e.g., Showpad), and a project-tracking tool used by Engineering (e.g., Jira) — enough to work inside these systems, not just consume their output.
• You have strong project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent initiatives and competing stakeholder priorities without losing quality.
• You’re comfortable reading and acting on learning/performance analytics — engagement, adoption, time-to-competency, and business performance data — to demonstrate program impact, not just completion.
• You communicate clearly and technically — able to write requirements Engineering can build from and explain platform constraints to non-technical stakeholders.
• You have an innovation-oriented mindset: you’re comfortable proposing and piloting AI-driven processes that compress traditional development timelines, and comfortable being wrong sometimes in service of moving faster.
• You have a bachelor’s degree in Instructional Design, Learning Experience Design, Educational Technology, or a related field; equivalent professional experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.