Director of Design

About Us

InStride Health’s mission is to deliver specialty anxiety and OCD care that works for every kid, teen, young adult, and family who needs it. Through this mission, we are expanding access to insurance-based care, increasing engagement in treatment, and improving treatment outcomes. We are doing this by combining research-backed clinical care and innovative technology to eliminate the major problems with care today: difficulty finding providers, months of waiting to be seen, arduous onboarding processes, and inconsistent use of evidence-based therapies and outcomes tracking. Our vision is to become the nation’s most trusted provider of pediatric anxiety and OCD care.

Team InStride Health: Our Core Values

• Give Heart: We lead with heart, treating patients and their families the way we want our loved ones to be treated. 
• Work Smart: We find smarter ways to solve hard problems and fix the broken mental health system by leveraging technology, diversity of thought, and innovation.
• Have Humility: We leave our egos at the door, empowering our team to collaborate, celebrate diversity, and adopt a growth mindset.
• Embrace Community: We all belong. We are in this together, and we never worry alone. We believe in each other and recognize that every voice matters.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Design to serve as the strategic architect and visionary for InStride Health’s product ecosystem. In this role, you will be responsible for a design vision that harmonizes technical innovation with clinical warmth, ensuring our use of technology and AI remains approachable and supportive to the families and clinicians we serve. By creating scalable design systems and clear guardrails, you will empower our engineering organization to deliver consistent, safe digital experiences that align instinctively with our core design principles. This role reports to the VP of Product, Technology. This is a fully remote position.

Responsibilities

• Define a Vision of Clinical Harmony: Establish a multi-year design roadmap that balances high-tech innovation with "clinical warmth," ensuring that InStride’s digital presence feels supportive and approachable for families and empowering for our team members.
• Operationalize a Design Architecture for Engineering Autonomy: Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to build the scalable systems required to move projects from vision to reality. You will create the robust guardrails that empower engineering teams to deliver consistent, high-quality experiences independently and in line with our core design principles.
• Stewardship of Human-Centered Technology and AI Strategy: Set the interaction principles and emotional guidelines that govern our use of technology and AI, ensuring automated touchpoints are consistently aligned with InStride’s mission of compassionate care.
• Establish Design Principles as Guardrails: Define and socialize the core design principles that serve as the source of truth for the InStride UI, allowing cross-functional partners to make accessible, safe, consistent design decisions at scale.
• Lead a Versatile Design Organization: Set the bar for design talent at InStride, mentoring individuals to act as strategic partners who can seamlessly move between operational and technical systems and human-centered design to deliver intuitive, high-quality experiences.
• Champion a Culture of Evidence: Establish the methodologies and standards for user research and discovery, ensuring that design decisions are grounded in clinical insights, patient feedback, and quantitative product data.
• Operational Stewardship: Own the design organization’s operational strategy, including headcount planning, budgeting for the design tool-stack, and the prioritization of design initiatives against the broader company roadmap.
• Unify the Experience Ecosystem: Partner with Marketing and Growth leadership to ensure a seamless transition between our external brand identity and our internal digital product, maintaining a consistent experience across every touchpoint.

What You Need to Succeed in the Role

• Executive-Level Design Leadership: 8+ years of experience in Product Design, with a proven track record of leading teams through periods of scale and technological transition.
• Systems Thinking & Architecture: Exceptional ability to deconstruct complex healthcare problems into scalable design systems and architectural frameworks that work across multiple product verticals.
• Versatile Experience Leadership: Success in leading design for complex systems that serve a broad range of users—from high-utility professional tools to warm, approachable consumer experiences.
• Operational Innovation: Proven ability to implement modern tools and AI to automate the design-to-code lifecycle, increasing organizational velocity without sacrificing craft or consistency.
• Strategic & Clinical Judgment: The ability to make high-stakes trade-offs between business speed, technical constraints, and clinical safety, always grounded in deep user empathy.
• Organizational Influence & Advocacy: Proven ability to build deep, high-trust relationships with senior leadership to secure organizational alignment and buy-in for a long-term design vision.
• Health Tech Mission Alignment: Prior experience in a clinical or regulated health tech environment is highly preferred, with a deep understanding of how design quality correlates to patient trust and safety, including HIPAA compliance, data privacy standards, and WCAG accessibility requirements.

The expected annual salary for this role is between $157,000-$175,000. Actual starting salary will be determined on an individualized basis and will be based on several factors including but not limited to specific skill set, work experience, etc. In addition to base compensation, this role offers a target performance-based bonus.

Why Join Our Team

• Generous benefits package (401k with match, Flexible PTO, paid holidays, paid service days, 4 week paid sabbatical, 12 week paid parental leave, health benefits starting on your first day, and more)
• Opportunity to join a mission-driven company that is changing the landscape of pediatric mental health treatment
• Chance to make a far-reaching impact by helping children and families access desperately-needed, evidence-based care
• Opportunity to work with talented and experienced team members who have devoted their lives to solving this problem
• Fully virtual: work from the comfort of your home with periodic in-person retreats

Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DEIB)

We want to make our clinical services available for everyone, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or how you identify. To achieve this, we recognize we must continually make progress in building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive team. Through these efforts, we support two primary objectives at InStride Health:

1. Providing high quality patient care to families. We are in a privileged position to support families during a vulnerable time in their lives. We approach all families and each other with compassion and are most effective as a diverse team where all individuals feel valued, respected, and accepted.
2. Building a mission-driven business that lasts. Specifically, we believe our commitment to a supportive culture improves innovation, decision-making, and efficiency.

We invite you to share any additional information about yourself or your experiences that may not be reflected in your CV. Inclusion of this information is completely voluntary.

Beware of fake job postings and offers. All official communications from InStride Health will come from email addresses ending in @instride.health. We will never ask for personal information such as Social Security numbers or bank details during the application process. If you receive a suspicious job offer or communication, please contact our recruitment team directly (talent@instride.health) to verify its authenticity.