Director of Product Design Beacon Biosignals
AI brain monitoring for rapid, targeted health interventions.
Permanent
Boston
Remote: Not specified
200K to 215K $ a year
> 7 years
Skills we're looking for
Motivational skills
Usability testing
Communication skills
Coaching and mentoring
You'll be part of
100 employees
Intelligence artificielle / Machine Learning
Our take
The brain has long been considered one of the most mysterious fields of medicine - and psychiatric and neurological diseases therefore one of the least understood. Better access to real-time brain data, however, could change this. That’s exactly what Beacon Biosignals is hoping to deliver. Beacon Biosignals has developed a scalable electroencephalogram (EEG) analytics platform that leverages AI to more accurately and insightfully manage brain data. Its capabilities run from analysing existing data, to identifying and standardising neorobiomarkers, to continuously aggregating and analysing trial data. The hope is that this will help clinical brain researchers carry out faster and more accurate work, ultimately accelerating the pace of treatment development in neurology. It’s a smart new AI application, and Beacon Biosignals is acquiring new companies to scale and receiving handsome funding - but for that reason the company isn’t alone in pursuing it. Bitbrain is also developing neurology AI, although with a tighter focus on product development. This may help differentiate Beacon Biosignals in what is still a relatively new market area.
You'll be working on
- Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Director of Product Design to lead and grow our Product Design function
- Product Design at Beacon is a shared function that serves the entire business: the hardware experience of our EEG headbands and other devices, the mobile apps that participants and patients use at home, the web applications that clinical teams and trial sponsors rely on, the printed materials that guide patients and site staff, and the design of internal business processes across logistics, support, and clinical operations
- In this role you’ll lead a team of three senior product designers, set the vision for how design works at Beacon, and plan the function’s growth as the company scales
- We expect this role to stay close to the craft. You’ll model best practices directly alongside the team, not just direct it from above
- This role reports directly to Beacon’s VP of Platform
- Lead and coach a team of three senior product designers, helping each of them grow their craft, expand their impact, and build a clear path forward in their careers
- Craft, iterate, and execute on a vision for what product design should be at Beacon, and translate that vision into a concrete plan for how the function grows alongside the business
- Operate as a player-coach, particularly in your first year: taking on design work yourself where it sets the standard, demonstrating the practices you want to see, and raising the bar by example rather than by directive
- Own prioritization across the full breadth of Beacon’s design surface, from device and mobile to web, print, and business process, making the tradeoffs that determine where a small, senior team spends its time and ensuring no single designer becomes a bottleneck for the company
- Build the cross-functional connections that design depends on, partnering closely with Device Engineering, Platform, Clinical Operations, Logistics, Support, and Quality to bring design into decisions early rather than at the end
- Establish the processes, standards, and shared systems that let design scale: a coherent design language across hardware and software, reusable patterns, and design reviews that improve quality without slowing delivery
- Ensure design’s contribution to Beacon’s regulated products is rigorous and well-documented, partnering with Quality and Regulatory on usability and human factors work for our cleared devices
- Own the headcount plan, budget, and vendor relationships for the function, and make the case for investment in design with the same rigor you’d bring to a design problem
- Develop a deep understanding of everyone Beacon serves: patients using our devices unsupervised at home, the clinical staff and healthcare providers who care for them, the site teams running trials, and the sponsors who rely on the insights we deliver. Build the research practice that keeps that understanding current
- Develop an equally deep understanding of how Beacon itself operates, so that design serves our internal teams as well as our external users, from device provisioning and logistics through support and scientific services
- See around corners: anticipate where design debt, inconsistency, or unowned experience problems are accumulating, and address them before they become urgent
We're looking for
- A portfolio that spans both hardware and software experiences. You’re comfortable moving between a physical device, a mobile app, a data-heavy web application, and the printed material that ties them together
- 10+ years of product design experience, including 4+ years managing and developing designers
- Experience designing service and business process experiences, not just product interfaces. You’ve improved how an organization operates, not only what it ships
- You demonstrate a bias towards simplicity, avoid misallocating complexity, and try to impose structure at the right time - not too early or too late
- You have experience and familiarity working in the medical device space, clinical diagnostics, real-world-data, pharma/biotech or other related fields
- You’re genuinely energized by coaching senior individual contributors. You can give feedback that a strong, experienced designer will respect and act on
- You’ve worked in a regulated industry before, and have successfully navigated the tension between fast-paced iterative design and strict design controls. Familiarity with usability engineering and human factors practice (e.g. IEC 62366, FDA human factors guidance) is a strong plus
- You bring strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align partners around decisions, tradeoffs, and evolving plans, including in regulated or quality-sensitive environments
- You’re comfortable being hands-on without defaulting to it. You know the difference between modeling the work and doing the work because it’s easier than delegating it
- You’re comfortable working in a highly asynchronous remote work environment, and have demonstrated success doing so in the past
- Experience building or substantially maturing a design function. You know what the first eighteen months of that work actually look like