Head of Design

Elation Health exists to enable every patient to experience the highest quality care wherever they go in the healthcare system. We build technology for independent primary care practices and the physicians, clinicians, and teams who care for their patients every day. Our platform brings together a clinical-first EHR, intelligent automation, billing, patient engagement, and the workflows that help primary care practices deliver excellent care and build sustainable businesses. The work is consequential: when our products are clear, trustworthy, and well designed, clinicians can spend more time focused on patients and less time fighting their tools. Primary care is foundational to a healthy healthcare system, yet the technology supporting it is often fragmented, burdensome, and disconnected from the realities of clinical work. At Elation, Design has the opportunity to make the experience of practicing medicine meaningfully better—while helping independent primary care remain strong, sustainable, and human. We are seeking a passionate Design leader to drive our design strategy, build a strongly capable Design organization, raise the quality and coherence of the product experience, and use AI-native ways of working to deliver more intuitive, trusted, and impactful experiences for clinicians and practices at scale. If you’re excited about shaping the next generation of AI-native primary care technology, this role is for you. The opportunity As Head of Design, you will set the vision, standards, and operating model for Design at Elation. You will lead a talented team of product designers and design partners, work closely with Product and Engineering leadership, and bring a strong design point of view to company strategy and product decisions. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can move comfortably between the strategic and the concrete: defining a coherent experience across a complex product, coaching designers through difficult problems, raising the quality bar, and ensuring the details hold up in the hands of real clinicians. You will report to the Chief Product Officer and serve as a senior voice in the Product Development organization. The title and scope will be calibrated to the experience and demonstrated impact of the person we hire. What you’ll do Set and communicate a clear design vision for Elation’s product experience, grounded in our clinical-first principles and the realities of primary care. Lead and shape an AI-native Design organization with a durable operating model for how designers, agents, and cross-functional teams work together to create higher-quality experiences at greater speed. Elation is already well on this journey, with AI-native product strategy, evolving design systems, and emerging AI-assisted design-review practices. Build a high-performing Design function: clarify roles and responsibilities, establish effective operating rhythms, create growth paths, and hire and retain exceptional design talent. Partner with the CPO, product leaders, engineering leaders, and executive stakeholders to translate company strategy into a focused product experience strategy and roadmap. Raise the quality bar across the end-to-end user experience, including research, service design, product strategy, interaction design, visual design, content, accessibility, and customer enablement. Strengthen the systems that allow design to scale: principles, patterns, documentation, design systems, research practices, reusable frameworks, and the connection between design artifacts and shipped product. Implement a practical design-review culture that improves decisions early, creates shared standards, protects team velocity, and makes quality everyone’s responsibility. Foster deep empathy for clinicians and practice teams by embedding a rigorous culture of user research across product development—engaging directly with clinical and billing experts through co-design, workflow observation, and qualitative and quantitative insights. Help teams solve the right problems before they move quickly on the wrong ones. Create clarity in ambiguous spaces and make tradeoffs explicit. Partner closely with Engineering to ensure that design intent survives implementation and that the finished experience is reliable, coherent, accessible, and delightful to use. Develop designers as leaders and active contributors to product direction—not simply as owners of screens or deliverables. Represent the customer and the design perspective in senior leadership discussions, product prioritization, launch decisions, and company-wide conversations about quality. Create an environment where designers can do their best work: one that is candid, collaborative, intellectually curious, and accountable for impact. What success looks like We will measure success through a combination of customer impact, product quality, organizational health, and operating leverage. In particular, we expect this leader to improve: Clinician and practice-team experience, including usability, consistency, and confidence in Elation’s products. Design quality and product coherence, with fewer late-stage design issues and less avoidable rework. The quality and consistency of customer insight used in product decisions. Design team health, retention, hiring, growth, and clarity of ownership. Product Development velocity through stronger design systems, review practices, reusable patterns, and AI-native ways of working. What we’re looking for Significant experience leading product design in a complex, multi-surface, or highly regulated environment. Experience in healthcare, health technology, enterprise SaaS, or another domain where trust and workflow quality matter is especially valuable. A track record of building, scaling, or materially strengthening a design organization, including hiring, coaching, org design, and talent development. Strong product judgment and the ability to connect design decisions to customer outcomes, business strategy, and technical realities. Experience partnering effectively with Product and Engineering leaders and influencing decisions beyond the Design function. Deep fluency across the UX stack: research, service design, information architecture, interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and design operations. A strong point of view on design quality, paired with the humility and communication skills to develop that point of view with others. The ability to make complex systems understandable and usable without flattening the nuance that matters. A demonstrated commitment to customer-centered, evidence-informed decision making. Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to make design rationale clear to executives, cross-functional partners, and designers at every level. Comfort operating in ambiguity, creating structure where it is needed, and making thoughtful decisions without waiting for perfect information. Salary: $200,000 - $260,000k/yr + variable Elation welcomes individuals from all backgrounds and walks of life. Elation is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and is dedicated to creating and maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment. We are committed to equal opportunity for all employees and applicants, and value individuals with diverse perspectives including, but not limited to: race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, gender identity or gender expression, national origin, disability or veteran status. Elation also complies with all applicable national, state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements of the Immigration and Nationality Act and IRCA. We firmly believe a strong culture that supports a diverse and inclusive workforce allows us to achieve Elation’s mission of helping independent primary care thrive.