Senior Instructional Designer

Synthesia•New York City, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Synthesia is seeking a Senior Instructional Designer to join their Customer Education team. This role focuses on the critical phases of needs analysis and learning design, with end-to-end ownership of learning projects. The ideal candidate will identify genuine learner needs, design effective learning experiences, and produce blueprints for content development. Collaboration is highly valued, and this role also involves facilitating live sessions and representing Synthesia at industry conferences. The company emphasizes a rigorous approach to AI in content creation, seeking individuals experienced beyond basic prompting, with a focus on building and refining AI-accelerated workflows. Key responsibilities include conducting thorough needs analyses, designing various learning formats (courses, certifications, live sessions), and ensuring clean handoffs to content developers while maintaining design authority. The role also involves hands-on development where necessary, providing feedback, and coaching team members. A significant aspect is building and iterating on AI-powered production workflows, understanding the appropriate use of AI, and promoting best practices within the team. The position requires facilitating engaging live sessions and representing Synthesia at major conferences, bringing insights back into the product roadmap. Continuous improvement through data analysis of engagement, completion, and assessment is also a core function.

Requirements

Proven senior-level instructional design experience, including end-to-end ownership of needs analysis and design.
A portfolio showcasing real-world customer-facing or professional learning experiences designed by the candidate.
Demonstrable experience facilitating live sessions and speaking to large audiences (conference stages, industry events, major webinars).
Hands-on experience building agentic or multi-step AI workflows, with a clear account of iteration and learning.
Experience working cross-functionally with Product, CS, Support, and Marketing.
Comfort with hands-on content development and publishing, not just specification.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Must be based in or relocating to the New York or Austin area.
Willingness to work approximately 2 days per week in the 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 language proficiency.

Responsibilities

Own Needs Analysis: Conduct discovery to determine learning needs by engaging with customers, analyzing product usage and support data, and collaborating with Product, CS, and Support teams. Differentiate real learning needs from content requests, making defensible recommendations based on evidence.
Own Learning Design: 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 such as learning objectives, outlines, storyboards, assessment strategies, and format decisions. Make deliberate modality choices (video, LMS, live workshop) with clear justifications.
Collaborate with fellow designers, sharing drafts, giving and receiving critique, and maintaining a consistent design standard. Contribute to the shared design system, templates, and ways of working to improve team efficiency and effectiveness.
Hand Off Cleanly — Then Get Your Hands Dirty: Provide detailed design specifications for Knowledge & Enablement Specialists and act as the design authority during development. Ensure the quality of all shipped content. Engage in hands-on development (scripting, editing, publishing) when it's the most efficient path to quality.
Provide clear, generous, and specific feedback, and coach the team's craft.
Build and Iterate on AI-Accelerated Workflows: Design and refine AI workflows for the production pipeline, focusing on multi-step, agentic systems. Treat workflows as products, versioning, evaluating, and improving them. Define the appropriate role of AI in the pipeline and ensure human oversight where necessary. Promote good AI practices across the team.
Facilitate and Represent: Lead live customer sessions, workshops, and webinars with energy and engagement. Represent Synthesia as a credible voice on instructional design and AI at major North American conferences, developing and delivering memorable talks and workshops. Integrate feedback from stage and sessions into the roadmap.
Measure and Improve: Utilize engagement, completion, assessment, and qualitative product data to evaluate learning effectiveness. Retire and rebuild underperforming content, treating the content catalogue as a living product.