Executive Director, Customer Onboarding (athenaOne)
Customer Service
Boston, MA, USA
Join us as we work to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Position Summary:
As Executive Director of Customer Onboarding, you will lead one of the most consequential parts of the customer relationship — the journey from contract execution through a successful, sustainable go-live. This is not a project management role. It is a consultative leadership role for someone who obsesses over customer outcomes, builds high-performing delivery organizations, and understands that how a customer goes live shapes everything that comes after. You will bring strategic vision, a deeply consultative approach, and the operational discipline to lead complex SaaS implementations at scale — while keeping the focus squarely on practice performance, clinical readiness, and revenue cycle health from day one.
About the Team:
Our Customer Onboarding team delivers athenaOne implementation across a diverse portfolio of ambulatory practices and health systems. We are project managers, consultants and advisors — equally fluent in workflow design, system configuration, change management, and go-live execution. We work across multiple, concurrent engagements with a wide range of stakeholders, and hold ourselves accountable to outcomes, not just milestones.
Essential Job Responsibilities:
Drive outcomes, not just timelines
Define and own go-live success metrics — time to baseline ramp, post-live revenue cycle stabilization, clinical workflow adoption, and NPS — treating them as the true measures of delivery quality
Ensure every implementation is designed around the customer's operational goals, not just the project plan
Use data proactively to identify at-risk engagements, realign resources, and intervene before customers feel the impact
Lead as a consultative partner
Serve as a senior advisor to customers, especially during complex or high-stakes implementations, bringing a point of view on best practices, tradeoffs, and the path to sustainable performance
Partner with Sales to shape realistic expectations during the pre-sale process — and with Customer Success to ensure a clean, well-documented handoff that sets customers up for long-term success
Influence product and operations roadmaps by surfacing patterns across your portfolio that reflect what customers actually need to succeed
Build and lead a high-performing delivery organization
Lead a diverse team of onboarding managers, advisors, and specialists
Foster a culture of customer obsession, consultative accountability, and continuous improvement — where team members feel ownership over outcomes, not just tasks
Develop team capability through coaching, structured feedback, and a shared delivery methodology that elevates the quality and consistency of every engagement
Champion shared services investments — in transformation, configuration, methodology, and post-live surveillance — that reduce variability and accelerate time to ramp across the portfolio
Advance the delivery model through AI, technology, and best-in-class consultation
Champion the evolution of athenahealth's onboarding delivery model — identifying where AI-enabled tools, automation, and intelligent workflows can reduce implementation friction, surface risk earlier, and accelerate time to ramp
Partner with product and technology teams to embed AI-driven insights into the onboarding experience — from configuration recommendations and workflow optimization to predictive post-live surveillance
Elevate the quality and consistency of change management and adoption practices across every engagement — ensuring customers are not just technically live, but operationally ready to perform on day one
Raise the bar on upfront consultation — positioning onboarding consultants as trusted partners who help customers make informed decisions about workflows, configuration, and change strategy well before go-live
Ensure post-live engagement is proactive, not reactive — designing a consultation model that monitors adoption signals, identifies performance gaps, and delivers targeted guidance through the stabilization period and beyond
Translate delivery insights and outcome data across your portfolio into scalable best practices, playbooks, and methodology improvements that benefit every customer and elevate the entire team
Execute with operational rigor
Deliver on budget, revenue forecast, and growth targets across your book of business
Monitor and actively manage key performance indicators, using them to drive decisions rather than report on them after the fact
Partner with the broader Customer Onboarding leadership team as a strategic thought leader — contributing to the evolution of our delivery model, team structure, and customer experience
Expected Education & Experience:
Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree strongly preferred
10+ years leading large-scale customer-facing implementation teams for complex SaaS solutions, with a demonstrated track record of outcome-based delivery
10+ years Healthcare IT experience
Minimum 5 years of direct people management within a Customer Success, Implementation, or Operations function; experience leading indirect and matrixed teams required
3–5 years leading strategic initiatives with a focus on change management, practice transformation, and measurable performance outcomes
Deep familiarity with Electronic Health Records (EHR) required
Healthcare, medical group operations, and/or medical billing experience strongly preferred
Demonstrated consultative approach, including guiding customers to informed decisions in complex environments
Strong ability to manage stakeholders and deliver across cross-functional teams
Ability to travel up to 40% nationwide
Expected Compensation
The base salary range shown reflects the full range for this role from minimum to maximum. At athenahealth, base pay depends on multiple factors, including job-related experience, relevant knowledge and skills, how your qualifications compare to others in similar roles, and geographical market rates. Base pay is only one part of our competitive Total Rewards package - depending on role eligibility, we offer both short and long-term incentives by way of an annual discretionary bonus plan, variable compensation plan, and equity plans.
About athenahealth
Our vision: In an industry that becomes more complex by the day, we stand for simplicity. We offer IT solutions and expert services that eliminate the daily hurdles preventing healthcare providers from focusing entirely on their patients — powered by our vision to create a thriving ecosystem that delivers accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all.
Our company culture: Our talented employees — or athenistas, as we call ourselves — spark the innovation and passion needed to accomplish our vision. We are a diverse group of dreamers and do-ers with unique knowledge, expertise, backgrounds, and perspectives. We unite as mission-driven problem-solvers with a deep desire to achieve our vision and make our time here count. Our award-winning culture is built around shared values of inclusiveness, accountability, and support.
Our DEI commitment: Our vision of accessible, high-quality, and sustainable healthcare for all requires addressing the inequities that stand in the way. That's one reason we prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in every aspect of our business, from attracting and sustaining a diverse workforce to maintaining an inclusive environment for athenistas, our partners, customers and the communities where we work and serve.
What we can do for you:
Along with health and financial benefits, athenistas enjoy perks specific to each location, including commuter support, employee assistance programs, tuition assistance, employee resource groups, and collaborative workspaces — some offices even welcome dogs.
We also encourage a better work-life balance for athenistas with our flexibility. While we know in-office collaboration is critical to our vision, we recognize that not all work needs to be done within an office environment, full-time. With consistent communication and digital collaboration tools, athenahealth enables employees to find a balance that feels fulfilling and productive for each individual situation.
In addition to our traditional benefits and perks, we sponsor events throughout the year, including book clubs, external speakers, and hackathons. We provide athenistas with a company culture based on learning, the support of an engaged team, and an inclusive environment where all employees are valued.
Learn more about our culture and benefits here: athenahealth.com/careers