Principal UX Designer

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.

We’re looking for a Principal UX Designer to contribute to our award-winning, electronic health record and physician practice management product.  

In this role, you will help lead the UX portion of our product development process for multidisciplinary agile R&D teams consisting of product managers, developers, data analytics specialists, and service operations agents — not to mention our customers — to define, design and test workflows that empower medical practice staff to efficiently and effectively manage the business of patient care while keeping the needs of the patient front and center.

This is a hybrid role based in our Boston office.

We’re working to simplify and modernize a complex set of front office workflows at healthcare practices into a more cohesive, intuitive, and empowering experience that helps staff work more confidently. In this role, you will lead the end-to-end user experience for front office workflows, shaping solutions that support patient access, scheduling, registration, check-in, and other critical administrative touchpoints. Your work will help front office staff do their jobs more efficiently and confidently, enable practices to run more smoothly, and ensure patients can access care with less friction and delay.

As a successful candidate, you will be a champion for our users and will embrace the challenge of solving complex problems that present the greatest opportunities to ease the burden on healthcare workers by removing obstacles and creating better paths. You will develop and advocate a clear point of view about UX decisions and tradeoffs, working across multiple teams to influence direction and drive alignment. You will function well both independently – making well-informed design decisions on your own – and in collaboration with cross-functional partners in product, engineering, and other disciplines.

You have an eye for design, and the ability to spot small details that others might miss. You love finding ways to drive incremental but significant improvements that keep us moving towards a greater long-term vision. You bring curiosity, empathy, and a sense of humor to everything you do. If you are looking for a company that will enable you to work outside of your comfort zone to transform the healthcare ecosystem, athenahealth is the place for you. 

Responsibilities may include, but are not limited to:

• Design Strategy & Planning

• Build deep understanding of user workflows and domain needs through research and analysis

• Own the information architecture and end-to-end experience for a major product area

• Co-own business outcomes with Product and Engineering partners

• Set UX strategy and long-term vision for major initiatives, with clear paths to delivery

• Define high-level workflows and experience frameworks to guide Agile teams

• Influence product roadmaps by aligning design vision with business and technical priorities

• Ground design decisions in user research, data, and success metrics

• Facilitate cross-functional teams in building deep empathy for users and understanding real-world needs

Leadership & Influence

• Elevate UX as a strategic discipline within product teams

• Support and empower teams to deliver cohesive, high-quality experiences

• Define and promote best practices for product owners, engineers, and more junior design collaborators

• Influence outcomes and decision-making without direct authority through strong communication

Design Execution

• Frame complex, user-centered problems and facilitate alignment

• Create sketches, wireframes, and prototypes to communicate and validate ideas

• Partner with Product and Engineering to ensure delivered solutions meet design intent and quality standards

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, Business, or related discipline

• Minimum of 8 years of professional UX design experience, including ownership of complex, enterprise-scale problem spaces

• Demonstrated experience owning information architecture and end-to-end experiences for large functional areas or platforms

• Extensive experience planning, facilitating, synthesizing, and acting on user research

• Deep knowledge of UX practices within Agile software development, including ideation, design techniques, and evaluative testing

• Expertise applying Design Thinking tools and methods to drive strategic clarity and innovation

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate design rationale to diverse audiences

• Enthusiasm for learning new problem spaces, with an ability to deeply immerse in a problem, rapidly develop an understanding, and produce actionable insights.

• Thrives in a highly collaborative, cross functional environment

Expected Compensation

The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates.  Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans.