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,