Dear Nishant and the Cerbo/OptiMantra team,

Most design leadership roles mean inheriting someone else's system. This one means building it, which is the work I keep choosing.

I direct a 12-person design practice at Coforma as a player-coach, spending most of my time in the work rather than above it. I've coached three direct reports into senior and lead roles through documented growth plans, and I'm in Figma every week.

My range runs wider than any one project:

• At CMS, I helped consolidate three design systems, Medicare, Healthcare.gov, and CMS.gov, onto one themeable foundation, holding each brand's identity without letting them blur into each other.
• At VA Lighthouse, I redesigned the developer onboarding path for an API platform serving 115+ engineers, the same discipline of getting a stranger from zero to productive fast.
• At Eastern Washington University, I built the university's UX practice and public web presence from nothing, At Eastern Washington University, I built the university's UX practice and public web presence from nothing, designing for everyday users, the same instinct Cerbo and OptiMantra need for patients and front-desk staff alongside clinicians.

Healthcare and AI:
My healthcare experience runs deeper than one project, and my AI experience isn't adjacent. It's direct.

• On the VA Disability Benefits crew, I was brought in to recover a flagged team, running WCAG-grounded, trauma-informed usability sessions and turning findings into design tickets so evidence, not assumptions, drove sprint priorities on veterans' benefits workflows.
• On CMS's Quality Payment Program, I restructured how practitioners navigated 195 shifting quality measures so they could act on their highest-value reporting tasks at a glance.
• On a VA AI pilot, I designed the interface layer connecting a clinical LLM workflow to live patient data inside VA's legacy EHR (VistA), validated by practitioners and accepted into VA's AI strategy portfolio. The client called the result "setting the bar at VA for AI," the same intersection Cerbo and OptiMantra are moving toward: clinical-grade tooling that earns a practitioner's trust, not just their attention.

I've built design systems from zero, too. At 2ndWatch, I established the full design language for an enterprise SaaS suite from scratch, delivered as a 23-page developer-facing specification over eight months.

Based in Spokane, I'm glad to travel regularly for a first design hire like this; the in-person time speeds things up.

I'd welcome the chance to build this with you.

Warmly,
Brent Schneider