Lead Instructional Designer (Contract)

Nectar; United States; On-site; USD 95,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Nectar is seeking a Lead Instructional Designer focused on quality and design authority for multiple concurrent courses. You will oversee a small team of designers, review plans and builds, and ensure alignment with client standards.

This is a contract-per-project engagement with weekly review cadence and direct client interaction. You will coach designers, manage design decisions across LMS builds (Canvas, Brightspace), and uphold accessibility and quality throughout development.

Qualifications

• Several years designing courses end-to-end.
• Experience reviewing other designers' work and giving direct, actionable feedback.
• Comfort in client-facing meetings and presenting design decisions.
• Ability to manage multiple courses in your head and meet client dates.
• Familiarity with accessibility standards and client design guidelines.

Responsibilities

• Review course plans, guides, and LMS builds against client standards and sign off before submission.
• Provide substantive feedback on outcomes, alignment, and assessability; avoid line edits.
• Bridge to the build; review the built course and ensure interactive elements render correctly in the LMS.
• Attend client, ID, and SME calls; explain trade-offs and uphold standards in discussions.
• Coach new contract designers and onboard them to templates, review processes, and timelines.
• Monitor scope, capacity, and risks; keep project status visible to PMs.

Skills

Instructional design

Quality review

Client-facing

Design authority

LMS knowledge

Project coaching

Education

Bachelor's degree in Education/Instructional Design or related field

Tools

Canvas

Brightspace

Google Workspace

Slack

Job description

ABOUT THE WORK

The Lead ID is accountable for the quality of what leaves Alchemy on a project. You would oversee a small group of instructional designers across a set of concurrent courses, reviewing their work before it reaches the client and acting as the design authority when questions come up. This is a contract role scoped per project rather than per course, and it runs alongside the client's development calendar. It is a client-facing role. You are the person a client escalates a design question to, and the person who explains a design decision when it needs explaining. You will also be coaching contract designers who are often new to the client and sometimes joining a course that is already half built.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Quality and design authority

Review each course plan, course guide batch and LMS build against the client's standards and our checklists before it is submitted, and sign off before it goes to the client. Give design feedback to the designers on your project. Not line edits, but the substantive calls: whether an outcome is assessable, whether an assessment measures what it claims to, whether the activity mix earns its place. Confirm each course team has completed the review checklist before submission, and return work that is not ready rather than passing it through. Act as the bridge to the build. Review the built course against the approved blueprint, check interactives render and behave once packaged into the LMS, and make the design calls when a build question needs one. Hold the line on accessibility and the client's design standards across every course on the project.

Meetings and client contact

Attend client calls for your project. You are the design voice in those rooms: present decisions, explain trade-offs, and absorb feedback without conceding standards we should not concede. This is a core part of the role and is included in the engagement fee. Attend ID and SME calls as necessary, or as the project requires. That is usually where an SME is new to online design, a subject is unusually complex, or a course is in trouble. Attend additional project calls as necessary, or as your contract stipulates.

Team and project Coach

Coach designers who are new to the project or to the client's standards, including designers who have joined mid-development and are inheriting someone else's partial work. Onboard new contract designers to the client's templates, review process and standards. Work with the project manager on sequencing, risk and realistic dates, and raise scope or capacity problems early rather than absorbing them. Keep your review status visible in the project system so the PM can see what is waiting on you.

HOW THE ENGAGEMENT WORKS

Contracted per project under a work for hire agreement, with a defined scope of courses and a defined period of performance. Paid at defined milestones against that scope. Not hourly, no timesheet. Expect a recurring weekly commitment rather than a burst of effort. Review work arrives on the development calendar, and the calendar does not wait. The course list can change. Courses get added, removed, delayed or reassigned. Material changes to the scope are handled as a contract amendment. You will work in our systems and the client's: Google Workspace, Slack, the project system, and the client's LMS. We use AI tooling in our process, including our own platform, and part of this role is judging where AI generated content meets our standards and where it does not. We expect a reply to email and Slack within one business day, and review turnaround inside the window stated in your contract. A late review blocks a build, which blocks a client date.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

Several years designing courses, including courses you took end to end yourself. You cannot review what you have not done. Experience reviewing other designers' work and giving direct, actionable feedback without damaging the relationship. Confident judgement on outcome alignment, assessment design and scope, and the willingness to say that something is not ready. Experience with learning management systems, Canvas and Brightspace in particular, and with how design decisions survive or fail at the build stage. Comfort in client-facing meetings, including ones where you are delivering news the client does not want. The ability to hold several courses in your head at once and know which one is about to slip. A degree in education, instructional design, instructional technology or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience leading contract or freelance designers rather than employees.
• Experience onboarding designers into a project that is already running.
• Experience with Articulate Storyline, Rise or H5P, enough to judge whether an interactive design is buildable.
• Quality Matters certification or similar.