Mark Levy

Mark Levy is a globally minded Employee Experience leader, advisor, and co-author who has spent his career helping organizations design work with people—not for them. He is known for partnering with big-hearted companies to unleash the talents and passions of employees while driving meaningful business results.

Levy is the co-author of "Employee Experience Design: How to Co-Create Work Where People and Organizations Thrive" (Wiley, 2026), written alongside Dean Carter (former CHRO of Patagonia) and Samantha Gadd, founder of EX Design School. The book introduces a practical, design-led approach to Employee Experience—moving beyond policies, perks, and surveys to help leaders intentionally design work that drives engagement, performance, and belonging. Grounded in real stories and tools from organizations such as Airbnb and Patagonia, the book equips leaders with actionable frameworks to bring humanity back to work while achieving measurable business outcomes.

Over the course of his career, Levy has designed and advised Employee Experience across a wide range of organizations, industries, and growth stages. Early on, he partnered with leaders at Best Buy, Levi Strauss & Company, and Gap Inc., supporting people strategies focused on learning, culture, and integrating work and life within complex global environments. He also spent two formative years living and working in Paris with Thomson/Technicolor, shaping his perspective on cross-cultural leadership.

Levy is best known as the pioneer of designing the Employee Experience at Airbnb, where he helped redefine how organizations think about people, culture, and community. At Airbnb, he led the shift from traditional HR to a holistic Employee Experience model focused on the end-to-end employee journey—integrating people operations with culture, social impact, and workplace experience. This work helped bring Airbnb’s mission of belonging to life internally and contributed to Glassdoor naming Airbnb the #1 Place to Work in 2016.

Since then, Levy has applied these principles across a range of organizations—from startups to large global brands—advising leaders on how to evolve from HR to Employee Experience, align internal culture with external brand promises, and create stronger connections between employees, customers, and communities. His experience includes supporting companies during moments of growth, change, and reinvention, including time spent leading Employee Experience at Allbirds.

In addition to his advisory work, Levy collaborates with mission-driven organizations including Backstage Capital, supporting underestimated founders as they scale their businesses and leadership capacity. He has also served on the Gap Foundation Board of Directors and currently sits on the board of First Graduate, a nonprofit helping first-generation students attend and graduate from college.

Levy holds a JD/MBA from the University of Colorado and completed his undergraduate studies at Colorado College. After briefly practicing law, he chose to focus his career on helping organizations do the right thing—by designing workplaces where people, purpose, and performance thrive.