Director of Product Design

Beacon Biosignals; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Director of Product Design to lead and grow our Product Design function, spanning the hardware headbands, mobile apps, web apps, printed materials, and internal processes. You will lead a team of three senior designers, set the craft, and plan the function's growth as the company scales.

We expect you to stay close to the craft and model best practices. Beacon’s robust asynchronous work culture supports remote work, with in-person hubs in Boston, New York City, and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of product design experience.
• 4+ years managing and developing designers.
• Portfolio spanning hardware and software experiences.
• Experience in medical device / regulated environments.
• Familiarity with usability engineering and human factors guidance.
• Strong coaching and stakeholder management.
• Hands-on when needed, with ability to delegate.
• Experience designing service and business processes.
• Excellent communication in regulated contexts.
• Comfort with asynchronous collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Lead and coach a team of three senior product designers.
• Define design vision and growth plan for the function.
• Act as player-coach, contributing hands-on work when needed.
• Own prioritization across hardware, mobile, web, print, and processes.
• Build cross-functional partnerships with Device Eng., Platform, Clinical Ops, Logistics, Support, Quality.
• Establish design systems, standards, and reviews.
• Ensure regulated product usability documentation with Quality.
• Own headcount, budget, and vendor relationships.
• Develop deep understanding of Beacon’s users and research practice.
• Understand Beacon’s operations to better serve internal teams.
• Proactively address design debt and inconsistencies.

Skills

Team leadership

Design leadership

Hardware & software

Regulated industries

Stakeholder management

Coaching seniors

Hands-on design

Service design

Communication skills

Asynchronous collaboration

Job description

Beacon Biosignals is transforming precision medicine for the brain, from clinical development to clinical care. For Life Sciences partners, we offer the leading at-home EEG platform for clinical development of novel therapeutics for neurological, psychiatric, and sleep disorders. Our Diagnostics business is building the most comprehensive at-home platform for precision diagnostics, combining EEG and cardiopulmonary signals to deliver reimbursable assessments for sleep and central nervous system disorders. Together, we're changing the way patients are diagnosed and treated for any disorder that affects brain physiology.

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.

Beacon's robust asynchronous work practices ensure a first-class remote work experience, but we also have in-person office hubs located in Boston, New York City, and Paris. For this position, candidates based in the Boston or surrounding area are preferred

What success looks like:

As a successful Director of Product Design at Beacon, you'll...

• 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.

What you will bring:

• 10+ years of product design experience, including 4+ years managing and developing designers.
• Experience building or substantially maturing a design function. You know what the first eighteen months of that work actually look like.
• 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.
• You have experience and familiarity working in the medical device space, clinical diagnostics, real-world-data, pharma/biotech or other related fields.
• 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're genuinely energized by coaching senior individual contributors. You can give feedback that a strong, experienced designer will respect and act on.
• 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.
• Experience designing service and business process experiences, not just product interfaces. You've improved how an organization operates, not only what it ships.
• 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 demonstrate a bias towards simplicity, avoid misallocating complexity, and try to impose structure at the right time - not too early or too late.
• You're comfortable working in a highly asynchronous remote work environment, and have demonstrated success doing so in the past.

The base salary range for this role is $200,000 - $215,000, depending on past experience, specific skills, and qualifications. The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes equity, PTO, and other benefits.

At Beacon, we've found that cultural and scientific impact is driven most by those that lead by example. As such, we're always seeking new contributors whose work demonstrates an avid curiosity, a bias towards simplicity, an eye for composability, a self-service mindset, and - most of all - a deep empathy towards colleagues, stakeholders, users, and patients. We believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact.