Lead UX Designer

athenahealth • Austin, TX

1d • $124,000 - $212,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all. Lead Designer The Opportunity Join athenahealth’s quest to make healthcare work the way it should. Our health is incredibly precious, and people in need of healthcare are often at their most fragile. Yet the function and experience of healthcare continue to fall far behind the innovative services we experience in other parts of our lives. athenahealth is looking for designers who can dive into complex design challenges and create solutions that help transform the healthcare industry. If you’re a talented, innovative, and strategic designer motivated to make a difference in healthcare, we want to talk to you. Help us reduce complexity in healthcare workflows and improve the experience of clinicians, staff, and patients across the healthcare ecosystem. From a visit to the doctor to managing chronic illness over a lifetime, your work will contribute to making healthcare simpler, safer, and more effective. Position Summary We’re looking for a Lead Designer to help shape the next generation of athenahealth’s electronic health record and physician practice management products. In this role, you will partner closely with Product Management and Engineering to define, design, and deliver complex workflow solutions that improve the daily experience of healthcare professionals. You will translate research insights, user needs, and product strategy into clear interaction models, workflows, and design artifacts that guide engineering implementation. This role will have significant influence on the design direction of athenahealth’s scheduling and clinical workflow experiences, shaping solutions used every day by healthcare professionals across the athenahealth network. As athenahealth continues evolving toward spec-driven development and AI-enabled product workflows, you will help ensure design outputs provide the clarity and systems thinking needed to support scalable product development.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology, Computer Science, Business, or related disciplines (relevant professional experience also considered) required
• 4–6 years of professional experience in product or UX design
• Experience designing complex workflow systems within enterprise or SaaS products
• Strong capability in interaction design, prototyping, and visual communication
• Experience planning and synthesizing insights from user research and usability testing
• Experience collaborating with product and engineering teams within agile development environments
• Ability to translate UX concepts into clear workflows, interaction models, or behavioral specifications
• Experience designing within established design systems and contributing feedback to improve shared components and patterns
• Familiarity with modern design tools and AI-assisted design or research workflows
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Design simple, effective, and elegant interactions for complex product workflows
• Create strong problem statements and metrics to ensure design solutions achieve meaningful business and user outcomes
• Build strong collaborative relationships with product, engineering, and research partners
• Provide clear rationale for design recommendations to gain alignment and support
• Navigate ambiguity and complex problem spaces with curiosity and structured thinking
• Adapt to evolving business priorities in a dynamic product environment
• Passion for improving healthcare experiences and solving meaningful real-world problems

Nice To Haves

• Experience in healthcare is a plus, but a passion for improving people’s lives through better technology is essential.

Responsibilities

• Identify and frame complex user-centered problems across clinical and operational workflows
• Lead problem framing and solution development for complex product challenges, guiding teams from discovery through delivery
• Design efficient, safe, and intuitive workflows that support high-stake clinical and operational decision making
• Design and refine complex scheduling workflows that coordinate patients, providers, and operational staff in dynamic healthcare environments
• Create artifacts ranging from early concepts and prototypes to detailed workflow and interaction specifications
• Translate UX concepts into clear workflow and interaction specifications that support spec-driven development
• Use prototypes, research, and experimentation to evaluate the usefulness and usability of product experiences
• Collaborate closely with Product Management and Engineering to ensure delivered features meet design intent and quality standards
• Apply shared design system patterns and collaborate with the design systems team to evolve components when new product needs emerge
• Leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate research synthesis, design exploration, and prototyping where appropriate
• Build deep understanding of healthcare workflows through user research, client engagement, and domain exploration
• Plan and execute exploratory research and experiments to inform product strategy and solution direction
• Contribute to journey maps, workflow models, and product vision artifacts that guide roadmap and backlog prioritization
• Partner with Product and Engineering to define success metrics and evaluate product outcomes
• Use behavioral data, analytics, and research insights to inform design decisions
• Help product and engineering teams build deep empathy for healthcare users and operational environments
• Contribute to the design of intelligent or AI-enabled product capabilities that improve scheduling efficiency and clinical productivity
• Guide junior designers and cross-functional team members through mentorship and design reviews
• Participate in team-wide initiatives to improve design processes, tools, and ways of working
• Champion modern design practices including systems thinking, design-to-engineering alignment, and data-informed design

Benefits

• Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.
• We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility.
• While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time.
• With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation.
• In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons.
• We provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level