Senior Instructional Designer
$115k - $135k • Remote • New York City • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
New York City
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Synthesia, a leading AI video platform for business, is seeking a Senior Instructional Designer to join their Customer Education team. This role is pivotal in shaping how the world learns to use Synthesia's platform. You will own the end-to-end process of needs analysis and learning design, creating blueprints for learning experiences that address genuine learner needs. This position requires a collaborative individual who is comfortable facilitating live sessions, representing Synthesia at industry conferences, and has a deep understanding of AI-accelerated content production pipelines, moving beyond basic prompt engineering to building and refining agentic workflows. The ideal candidate will bring a rigorous, evidence-based approach to design and a passion for improving learning outcomes.
Responsibilities
- Conduct needs analysis by talking to customers, analyzing product usage and support data, and collaborating with internal teams to identify learner challenges.
- Differentiate between genuine learning needs and content requests, making defensible recommendations.
- Define target audiences, personas, prerequisites, and success metrics for learning initiatives.
- Design courses, certifications, learning paths, and live sessions based on strong instructional design principles.
- Translate complex product concepts into clear, outcome-driven learning experiences.
- Produce design artifacts including learning objectives, outlines, storyboards, and assessment strategies.
- Make deliberate modality choices (video, in-LMS, live workshop) and justify them.
- Collaborate with fellow designers, sharing drafts, giving and receiving critique, and contributing to a consistent design standard.
- Contribute to the shared design system, templates, and team workflows.
- Hand off well-specified designs to Knowledge & Enablement Specialists and maintain design authority during development.
- Ensure the quality of all shipped content.
- Develop, script, edit, and publish content directly when it's the most efficient path.
- Provide clear, constructive feedback and coach team members' craft.
- Design and refine AI workflows for the production pipeline, focusing on multi-step, agentic systems.
- Treat AI workflows as products, versioning, evaluating, and improving them.
- Determine appropriate use cases for AI within the pipeline, ensuring human oversight where necessary.
- Promote good AI practices within the team.
- Facilitate live customer sessions, workshops, and webinars with energy and engagement.
- Represent Synthesia at major North American conferences as a voice on instructional design and AI.
- Develop and deliver memorable talks, demos, and workshops.
- Incorporate insights from conferences and customer interactions into the product roadmap.
- Measure the effectiveness of learning content using engagement, completion, assessment, and qualitative data.
- Retire and rebuild underperforming content.
- Manage the content catalogue as a living product.
Requirements
- Senior instructional designer with proven depth in needs analysis and design, supported by a strong portfolio.
- Ability to think in terms of systems and pipelines, not just individual assets.
- Strong collaborative skills and ability to thrive in a team environment.
- Experience designing and iterating on AI-accelerated workflows, including multi-step, agentic, tool-using systems.
- Experience evaluating AI output, identifying failures, and implementing improvements.
- Understanding of where AI is best applied in a content production pipeline and where human intervention is critical.
- Experience facilitating live sessions, workshops, and webinars.
- Experience speaking at industry conferences.
- Ability to bring insights from external engagements back into product roadmaps.