Lead User Experience Designer at Athenahealth in Boston, MA

Lead User Experience Designer

Location: Boston MA

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

Join athenahealth’s quest to make healthcare work the way it should.

athenahealth is looking for designers who can dive into complex design challenges and create solutions to 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.

Position Summary

We’re looking for a Lead Experience Designer to join the Medication Management team within our Clinicals product. In this role, you will partner with product and engineering to solve complex clinical and operational problems through thoughtful UX strategy, research, and design execution. You will balance strong design craft with practical decision-making to move work forward in a large, regulated product environment. You’ll develop a deep understanding of the needs and workflows of providers and clinical staff, identify opportunities, and design meaningful improvements that ease the burden on humans in healthcare.

About the Team

The Medication Management (Meds) team develops efficient, intuitive experiences across a system that sends over 17 million prescriptions per month. It provides clinicians with information about patients’ medications and supports medication management and vaccine administration so they can deliver high-quality patient care.

We envision a future where medication management is effortless, intelligent, and connected, so every patient can start and stay on the treatment that is best for them. As part of the Meds zone, you’ll work to create more tailored experiences related to ordering and reconciliation, medication list management, and medication adherence, reimagining and optimizing capabilities our users consistently identify as essential to their work.

A successful candidate will embrace the challenge of elevating design within an enterprise product team. You’ll champion our users, develop a clear point of view on UX decisions, and work both independently and collaboratively to influence outcomes across the zone. You enjoy finding ways to drive incremental but significant improvements that keep us moving toward a greater long-term vision.

Role Location

This is a hybrid role based in Boston, MA. Domestic travel is expected a few times per year to conduct onsite research with our customers, shadowing clinicians who use our products.

Essential Job Responsibilities:

• Lead discovery and framing of user-centered problems across complex product areas.

• Facilitate visioning sessions and translate ideas into sketches, flows, wireframes, and prototypes.

• Conduct and synthesize user research, heuristic reviews, and client feedback to inform design decisions.

• Partner with product and engineering throughout agile planning, development, and release cycles to ensure design intent is carried through implementation.

• Develop interaction models and workflows that simplify complex user, system, and data relationships.

• Present design concepts, recommendations, and tradeoffs to product, clinical, and engineering stakeholders.

• Support team-level design practices and process improvements that strengthen consistency and quality.

• Use AI tools to accelerate design exploration, prototyping, and refinement while applying judgment to select, adapt, and validate outputs before sharing with partners.

Additional Job Responsibilities:

• Contribute to design system adoption and consistency across product experiences.

• Support cross-functional planning by helping clarify scope, risks, and design dependencies.

• Collaborate on documentation that communicates design rationale and implementation guidance.

• Participate in team critiques and shared learning to strengthen design quality.

• Mentor junior designers through design reviews, feedback, and day-to-day collaboration.

• Help identify opportunities to improve workflows, tools, and team practices.

• Support onboarding and knowledge sharing for new team members.

• Adapt to changing priorities and contribute to adjacent work as needed.

Expected Education & Experience:

• 5+ years of professional experience in digital product design

• Experience creating strong design deliverables, including visual design, interaction design, prototyping, copywriting, and design specifications.

• Experience planning, facilitating, analyzing, and presenting user research using qualitative and quantitative methods.

• Experience working in an agile software development environment.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Strong stakeholder management skills with ability to influence without direct authority.

• Experience using AI tools as part of a design workflow is preferred.

• Experience designing for complex enterprise, healthcare, or workflow-heavy products is preferred.

• Ability to work through ambiguity, evaluate tradeoffs, and make timely decisions that keep work moving forward.

Expected Compensation

$130,000 - $222,000

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.