Principal User Experience Designer

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 multifaceted Principal Experience Designer to join the Medication Management team within our Clinicals product. This role combines hands-on experience design with strategic design leadership, requiring someone who can both shape the long-term direction of our product and translate that vision into thoughtful, effective solutions. Working closely with a multidisciplinary agile R&D team, you’ll develop a deep understanding of the needs and workflows of providers and clinical staff, identify opportunities to improve their experiences, and help drive 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

• Conduct generative research to inform product strategy, identify opportunities, and define project scope.

• Translate complex clinical workflows and user needs into intuitive product experiences, from early concepts through detailed interaction design and implementation.

• Collaborate with cross-functional colleagues to establish a long-term vision for complex problem spaces and translate that vision into manageable phases of work.

• Guide teams through decisions and tradeoffs related to project scope, design strategy, and implementation, balancing user needs, risks, dependencies, and business constraints.

• Create workflows, journey maps, vision documents, and other artifacts to influence product backlog prioritization and planning.

• Plan and facilitate workshops to interpret research, frame problems, identify opportunities, explore solutions, and align teams on next steps.

• Foster empathy for users through storytelling and compelling, shareable research and design artifacts.

• Help define success criteria and metrics to evaluate design outcomes.
  

Additional Job Responsibilities

• Proactively build relationships across product teams and organizational boundaries to promote collaboration, cohesion, and consistency across the full user experience.

• Mentor junior designers and guide cross-functional colleagues through design reviews and collaborative problem-solving.

• Contribute to team-wide initiatives that strengthen design processes and practices.

• Adapt to evolving business and team needs with flexibility, initiative, and a willingness to contribute wherever needed to achieve results.
  

Expected Education & Experience

• 8+ years of professional UX experience.

• Demonstrated ability to influence across functions and product areas, incorporating diverse perspectives while developing and advocating for a clear point of view.

• Deep knowledge of UX practices within agile software development, including ideation, interaction design, user research, and evaluative testing.

• Extensive experience conducting and synthesizing user research, immersing yourself in complex problem spaces, and translating insights into actionable product decisions.

• Strong analytical thinking, problem-framing, and communication skills, with the ability to navigate ambiguity, consider risks and constraints, and make timely decisions.

• Hands-on experience with or exposure to emerging AI tools, with the ability to explore new tools independently and apply them thoughtfully to accelerate work and create meaningful value.

• Portfolio demonstrating the ability to tell a compelling story about discovering problems, defining solutions, influencing strategy, and collaborating on successful execution

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.

About Us

United by our mission and driven by our entrepreneurial spirit, our work at athenahealth is collaborative, transformative, and above all, it’s meaningful. Our employees take pride in using technology and data-driven insights to inspire changes that will make the U.S. healthcare system better for everyone, including your friends, family and maybe even you.

Notice to Job Seekers/Job Candidates: Recruitment Fraud Alert

Please be aware of questionable job offers that are not affiliated with athenahealth.

athenahealth has been made aware of unauthorized career opportunities offered by individuals posing as representatives of larger U.S. companies, including athenahealth. The fictitious jobs are advertised on employment-search websites, such as Indeed.com and Craigslist.com, and prospective employees are required to share their personal and financial information (e.g. credit card, bank information), provide copies of their government-issued identification, and/or send money for application fees, processing charges or work permits.

The victims who are told they are "hired" are often instructed to deposit a check (which is later returned as fraudulent) into their own account and to forward overpayment to individuals - usually via wire transfer.

Important information for job seekers:

• athenahealth has a formal application process and we do not request you to interview on a Google Hangout or via text messaging.
• athenahealth will never request money for the opportunity to apply or work for athenahealth.
• athenathealth does not require completion of tax forms, bank account or credit card information as part of the recruiting process.

If you feel that you have been a victim of such a scam, please send an email to: askhr@athenahealth.com