Senior Instructional Designer

We're looking for a Senior Instructional Designer to join the team that shapes how Synthesia teaches the world to use Synthesia. This is Customer Education, not in-house enablement.

You'll be joining a team of instructional designers who collectively own the part of the pipeline where quality is actually decided: needs analysis and learning design . You'll carry your own portfolio of work end-to-end - figuring out what learners genuinely need, deciding what to build (and what not to), and producing design blueprints sharp enough that our Knowledge & Enablement Specialists can develop and publish them without needing to guess.

You'll stay close to the build, getting hands-on in development where it counts, but your leverage comes from the thinking that happens before anyone opens a timeline.

You'll be joining a team of ambitious instructional designers who will be your deep collaborators, sounding board and discussion partners. We work hard to avoid silos - collaboration is highly valued and built into out structure.

This role is also the face and voice of our learning content . You'll facilitate live sessions and workshops for customers, and you'll represent Synthesia on stage at some of the biggest L&D, and AI conferences in North America. If you're happiest designing quietly in a doc and never speaking to a room, this isn't the role.

And a word on AI, because we mean something specific by it: we are AI first but we loath AI slop. We've built a purpose-built content production pipeline that AI accelerates - it doesn't replace the craft, the instructional rigour, or the review gates. We want someone who has gone well beyond typing a prompt into a chat window: someone who has built agentic workflows, broken them, measured them, and made them better.

- Run the discovery that decides what we build: talk to customers, interrogate product usage and support data, work with Product, CS, and Support to find where learners are actually getting stuck.

- Separate real learning needs from content requests. Say no to the ones that don't hold up, and make the case for the ones that do.

- Define audiences, personas, prerequisites, and success measures before design begins.

- Bring evidence, not vibes. Your recommendations should be defensible.

- Design courses, certifications, learning paths, and live sessions grounded in strong instructional design principles.

- Turn complex product concepts into clear, sequenced, outcome-driven learning experiences.

- Produce the design artefacts the pipeline runs on: learning objectives, outlines, storyboards, assessment strategy, activation hypothosises and format decisions.

- Make deliberate modality choices - video, in-LMS experience, live workshop - and be able to explain why.

- Work in the open with your fellow designers: share drafts early, give and take critique properly, and help hold a consistent design standard across everything the team produces.

- Contribute to the shared design system, templates, and ways of working, so the team gets faster and better together rather than each designer reinventing the approach.

3. Hand Off Cleanly - Then Get Your Hands Dirty

- Hand off to Knowledge & Enablement Specialists with designs specified well enough to build from directly, and stay available as the design authority through development.

- Hold the quality bar across everything that ships, whether or not you personally built it.

- Get hands-on in development yourself: build, script, edit, and publish where it's the fastest path to something good.

- Give clear, generous, specific feedback. Coach the team's craft, don't just approve their output.

- Design and refine the AI workflows that power our production pipeline - multi-step, agentic, tool-using systems, not one-shot prompts.

- Treat your workflows like a product: version them, evaluate their output, find where they break, and improve them.

- Know exactly where AI belongs in the pipeline and where a human has to stay in the loop. Defend that line.

- Bring the rest of the team along, so good AI practice becomes how we work rather than a thing you do alone.

- Facilitate live customer sessions, workshops, and webinars - with real energy, not read-aloud slides.

- Speak at major North American conferences as a credible voice on instructional design in the age of AI.

- Develop and deliver talks, demos, and workshops that people remember and act on.

- Bring what you hear on stage and in rooms back into the roadmap.

- Use engagement, completion, assessment, and qualitative product data to judge whether learning actually worked.

- Retire and rebuild content that isn't earning its place.

- Treat the whole content catalogue as a living product.

- A senior instructional designer with real depth in needs analysis and design, and a portfolio that proves it.

- Someone who thinks in systems and pipelines , not just individual assets.

- A strong peer - you're at your best in a team of good designers, you share work before it's finished, and you take critique as a gift rather than a threat.

- A confident facilitator and public speaker , online and in person, who genuinely enjoys a room and a stage.

- Fluent with AI beyond prompting - you've built agentic or multi-step workflows and iterated on them with real rigour.

- Allergic to slop. You'd rather ship three excellent things than thirty forgettable ones.

- Comfortable being both the design authority and a pair of hands, depending on what the week needs.

- Customer-obsessed, and at home in a fast-moving, product-led environment.

- Proven senior-level instructional design experience, including owning needs analysis and design end-to-end .

- A portfolio of real-world customer-facing or professional learning experiences you designed.

- Demonstrable experience facilitating live sessions and speaking to large audiences - conference stages, industry events, or major webinars.

- Hands-on experience building agentic or multi-step AI workflows , with a clear account of how you iterated and what you learned.

- Experience working cross-functionally with Product, CS, Support, and Marketing.

- Comfort getting hands-on in content development and publishing, not just specification.

- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

- Based in or relocating to the New York or Austin area, and up for ~2 days a week in office.

- Experience with a customer-facing LMS or CMS.

- Experience creating learning content with Synthesia or other video-based tools.

- A track record of published talks, articles, or community presence in L&D, instructional design, or AI.

- Assessment and certification design experience.

- French, German, or Spanish speaker.

We care much more about evidence than adjectives. In your application, show us:

- One learning experience you designed , and the needs analysis that led you there - including what you decided not to build.

- One AI workflow you built , how it evolved, and how you knew it was working.

- One talk or session you delivered. A recording, a deck, a link. Anything real.

- Own the Decisions That Matter: You'll shape what gets built and why, not just how it looks.

- Real Peers, Not a Team of One: You'll work alongside other senior instructional designers who care about the craft as much as you do.

- A Real Pipeline, Not a Content Treadmill: Purpose-built, AI-accelerated, and yours to improve.

- A Platform and an Audience: Our stage presence in North America is growing fast, and you'll be a big part of it.

- High Craft, High Trust: Autonomy to build things properly and hold a high quality bar.

- A Team That Loves Building: We iterate, collaborate, and care deeply about the details.

Compensation: $115,000 - $135,000 OTE. The final compensation package will be determined based on your experience, qualifications, and location.

Location: New York City - Nomad District or Austin Texas metro (Hybrid - 2 days per week in office)

The good stuff...

In addition to being a part of a great team, working in a fun and innovative environment,

we offer:

- A competitive salary + stock options in our fast-growing Series E startup

- Hybrid working environment for NY based employees

- 100% Medical, Dental & Vision

- 401k Plan + company match

- Paid parental leave

- 25 days of annual leave + Public holidays + paid sick leave

- Fun culture with regular socials

- A generous referral scheme

- A brand new computer + monitor