Senior Instructional Designer
Listed on 2026-08-07
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Design & Architecture
Digital Media & Production, UI/UX Design
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 our 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.
WhatYou'll Do1. 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.
- 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.
- 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…
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