Senior Instructional Designer

Job description

Synthesia is the world’s leading AI video platform for business, used by over 90% of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in London, with offices and teams across Europe and the US. As AI continues to shape the way we live and work, Synthesia develops products to enhance visual communication and enterprise skill development, helping people work better and stay at the center of successful organizations. Following our recent Series E funding round, where we raised $200 million, our valuation stands at $4 billion. Our total funding exceeds $530 million from premier investors including Accel, NVentures (Nvidia's VC arm), Kleiner Perkins, GV, and Evantic Capital, alongside the founders and operators of Stripe, Datadog, Miro, and Webflow. THE ROLE: DESIGN THE LEARNING. SET THE STANDARD. TAKE THE STAGE. 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. WHAT YOU'LL DO 1. OWN NEEDS ANALYSIS - 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. 2. OWN LEARNING DESIGN - 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. 4. BUILD AND ITERATE ON AI-ACCELERATED WORKFLOWS - 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. 5. FACILITATE AND REPRESENT - 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. 6. MEASURE AND IMPROVE - 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. WHO YOU ARE - 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. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR MUST-HAVES - 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. NICE-TO-HAVES - 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. HOW TO STAND OUT We care much more about evidence than adjectives. In your application, show us: 1. One learning experience you designed, and the needs analysis that led you there — including what you decided not to build. 2. One AI workflow you built, how it evolved, and how you knew it was working. 3. One talk or session you delivered. A recording, a deck, a link. Anything real. WHY JOIN SYNTHESIA - 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