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Are you ready to shape the future of team member experiences across the entire employee lifecycle? As the Director of Behavioral Systems Design, you’ll integrate cognitive psychology, behavioral science, and systems thinking to understand, predict, and shape human behavior within complex organizational ecosystems. This role spans all elements of the team member journey—from hire to retire—ensuring that experiences, policies, and systems are designed for both human adoption and systemic sustainability.
With a focus on digital and AI-enabled transformation, you will lead efforts to design interventions that drive meaningful outcomes across critical moments that matter in the employee journey. Through rigorous research, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration, you’ll ensure that behavioral and cognitive insights are embedded into every touchpoint, creating a seamless and impactful employee experience.
Lead the integration of cognitive and behavioral insights into the design of systems and experiences that enhance engagement, readiness, and performance across the employee lifecycle.
Map how employees perceive, process, and decide within digital and organizational systems, identifying mental models, biases, and cognitive factors that shape behavior.
Partner with cross-functional teams to embed behavioral and cognitive insights into journey maps, workflows, and employee experience blueprints.
Prototype and scale interventions that drive sustainable behavior change, such as nudges, governance strategies, and feedback loops.
Develop closed-loop learning systems to measure how changes in organizational systems influence human behavior and vice versa.
Define human-AI interaction models grounded in cognitive science, mapping trust, effort, and decision thresholds for AI adoption while ensuring alignment across the broader employee journey.
Key Impact Areas
Cognitive & Behavioral Insight: Translate rich cognitive and behavioral data into actionable design principles that enhance engagement, learning, and adoption across the employee lifecycle.
Systems Thinking & Design: Diagnose and visualize how policies, workflows, technology, and culture interact to shape behavior, creating strategies that shift the system as a whole.
Experience Integration & Enablement: Collaborate with design and delivery teams to operationalize insights into scalable solutions, such as nudges, micro-learning, and behavioral interventions.
Lifecycle Optimization: Drive measurable outcomes across key moments that matter—from recruitment and onboarding to career development, transitions, and retirement.
Digital & AI Readiness: Lead the design of human-AI interaction models, trust-building strategies, and foresight planning to ensure AI adoption and readiness are seamlessly integrated into the employee journey.
Experience and Qualifications
Proven experience leading behavioral systems design or applied behavioral research in a complex organizational environment (e.g., healthcare, tech, finance, or consulting).
Track record of influencing strategy and design through cognitive and behavioral insights, systems thinking, and experimentation.
10+ years of experience in behavioral science, cognitive psychology, or related fields.
Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in Behavioral Science, Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Economics, or Systems Design.
We provide compensation, benefits, and resources that enable a highly inclusive culture and support our team members’ ability to live with purpose every day. In addition to traditional offerings like medical, dental, and vision care, we also provide a comprehensive suite of benefits that focus on the physical, emotional, financial, and social aspects of wellness. This encompasses support for working families, which may include backup dependent care, adoption assistance, infertility coverage, family building support, behavioral health solutions, paid parental leave, and paid caregiver leave. To encourage your personal growth, we also offer a variety of training programs, professional development resources, and opportunities to participate in mentorship programs, employee resource groups, volunteer activities, and much more. For details, visit https://www.virtualfairhub.com/cencora
Full time*This Salary Range reflects a National Average for this job. The actual range may vary based on your locale. Ranges in Colorado/California/Washington/New York/Hawaii/Vermont/Minnesota/Massachusetts/Illinois State-specific locations may be up to 10% lower than the minimum salary range, and 12% higher than the maximum salary range.
Cencora is committed to providing equal employment opportunity without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or membership in any other class protected by federal, state or local law.
The company’s continued success depends on the full and effective utilization of qualified individuals. Therefore, harassment is prohibited and all matters related to recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, promotions and transfers comply with equal opportunity principles and are non-discriminatory.
Cencora is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the employment process which are consistent with legal requirements. If you wish to request an accommodation while seeking employment, please call 888.692.2272 or email hrsc@cencora.com. We will make accommodation determinations on a request-by-request basis. Messages and emails regarding anything other than accommodations requests will not be returned
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