Head of Design
What I'd Bring
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, while staying in Figma every week.
I think in systems before I think in screens:
Healthcare isn't a single line on my resume, and my AI experience isn't adjacent. It's direct:
On the VA AI pilot, using AI tools to build working prototypes in real time, I compressed client alignment from biweekly sprints to days- something to react to, not a deck to approve. That real-time cadence became the basis for my writing on the forward-deployed designer model.
Based in Spokane, I'm glad to travel regularly for a first design hire like this to speed things up.
I'd welcome the chance to build this with you.
Warmly,
Brent Schneider
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, while staying in Figma every week.
I think in systems before I think in screens:
- On the CMS Design System team, 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 matured the API platform from beta to v2.0, designing the developer onboarding path from zero to production.
- 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.
- Mapping dense clinical flows end to end and making them simple in Figma is exactly the craft this role asks for.
Healthcare isn't a single line on my resume, 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) system, 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.
On the VA AI pilot, using AI tools to build working prototypes in real time, I compressed client alignment from biweekly sprints to days- something to react to, not a deck to approve. That real-time cadence became the basis for my writing on the forward-deployed designer model.
Based in Spokane, I'm glad to travel regularly for a first design hire like this to speed things up.
I'd welcome the chance to build this with you.
Warmly,
Brent Schneider
