Lead Experience Designer, Interoperability

Healthcare is one of the most complex problem spaces designers can work in. At athenahealth, we don’t shy away from that complexity; we lean in to understand it and unravel it. We believe thoughtful design, paired with modern AI capabilities, can turn complexity into clarity and momentum, leading to better outcomes for the people who care for patients every day. 

We’re looking for a Lead Experience Designer to join our Data & Ecosystem Platform team in Boston, someone who is part envisioner, part craftsperson, part facilitator. This is a role for a designer who gets excited about what does not yet exist, sees AI as a creative partner, and can translate abstract opportunity into tangible, human-centered experiences across digital products and broader services. You are energized by how AI can help speed up understanding & prototyping and improve decision making. 

This role sits at the intersection of athena’s interoperability products and clinical workflows. You’ll be designing new enterprise software experiences for healthcare organizations - work that’s both hard and rewarding. Success requires curiosity, persistence, deep collaboration across divisions, and a genuine appetite for learning hard domains, understanding data, and creatively navigating constraints. 

What You’ll Do 

Shape product strategy through experience design 

• Build a solid understanding of the business opportunity, including market context, customer segments, incentives, and goals, and use that understanding to inform experience direction. 

• Work in close partnership with strategy, product, engineering, and data leaders to define new product offerings from early signals, strategy, and unmet needs. 

• Ensure that emerging product experiences address important problems and create meaningful value for end users and the business. 

• Connect strategy to execution by bringing early ideas to life and helping teams move from abstract concepts to tangible, shared direction through iterative design

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Build deep customer understanding and user empathy 

• Drive the team to continually build deep customer understanding and user empathy through direct engagements with clinicians and operators. 

• Facilitate user research and sense-making, including experimenting with novel, AI-enabled ways to synthesize insight, test concepts, and accelerate learning. 

• Establish clear feedback loops and monitor how features perform in the real world, ensuring our work delivers meaningful outcomes for users

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Push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI 

• Experiment with new AI-enabled methods to accelerate learning, explore a wider solution space, and rethink how we design, build, test, and launch software. 

• Use AI to help teams and stakeholders reason about complex systems, prototype ideas earlier, and evaluate options before they are fully built. 

• Model how integrated AI can responsibly elevate design practice and help others adopt those approaches in their day-to-day work

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Execute and ship high-quality experience designs 

• Own and deliver human-centered design execution across detailed UX/UI and complex workflows, carrying work through build, launch, and iteration in close partnership with engineering and analytics. 

• Understand and design within real constraints (technical, regulatory, and operational) while still pushing for meaningful improvement and innovation. 

• Deliver complete solutions to customer problems by educating and influencing operational teams to improve the service experiences that wrap around our software

Influence and align without authority across subdivisions 

• Partner closely with designers, product owners, and cross-functional leaders in adjacent subdivisions to shape a shared experience vision and execution plan.  

• Create clarity and alignment across organizational boundaries by articulating user needs, making ideas tangible early, and facilitating decision-making when priorities or perspectives differ 

• Lead through influence – using craft, evidence, and strong relationships rather than hierarchy – to ensure teams converge on solutions that work for clinicians, technical partners, and the broader business.  

What We’re Looking For 

• 7+ years of experience in UX, experience design, product, or service design, ideally in complex, data-rich, or regulated environments (enterprise SaaS, healthcare, fintech, gov tech, etc.). 

• An innovator and envisioner who is energized by what AI tools unlock, especially for building, prototyping, and testing solutions that have never been invented before. 

• A T-shaped designer with deep expertise in designing digital experiences, plus the breadth to flex across types of design, problem spaces, and functions (services, processes, workflows, systems, and communications, technology, etc.). 

• Insatiable curiosity and a desire to understand both individuals and systems 

• Comfort operating in ambiguity, taking risks, and iterating toward meaningful outcomes, especially during early phases when the focus is on learning the domain, shaping direction, and exploring opportunities before a concrete workflow is defined. 

• Clear, inclusive communication skills, with the ability to align diverse stakeholders around user needs, technical realities, and business goals

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Strong preference for: 

• Knowledge about healthcare data and clinical workflows across hospitals and/or ambulatory settings. 

• Experience working with operational teams to improve service experiences 

Why This Role Matters 

The work you’ll do helps shape how data, intelligence, and AI show up for the people running and delivering healthcare every day. Within the Data & Ecosystem Platform, your designs will contribute to experiences that unify the healthcare ecosystem, making insight more accessible, workflows more coherent, and systems more trustworthy, while having real human impact at scale.