Head of Design

About the Role:

Reporting to the VP of Product, the Head of Design is the senior design leader accountable for design discipline, the ELMO design system, and design quality across ELMO's product organisation. You will be working with a team of Sydney & Melbourne-based Product Designers reporting directly to this role and are matrixed into cross-functional squads, mirroring how Product and Engineering operate.

We are seeking a hands-on, strategic Head of Design to lead our product design discipline, manage our design team, and take total ownership of usability, accessibility (WCAG AA), and our ELMO design system.

Operating in an AI-native, product-led model, you will ensure AI-accelerated design translates into exceptional usability across traditional, conversational, and multi-modal interfaces.

Key Responsibilities:

• Leadership & People: Direct line-manage five Mid & Senior Product Designers; set career pathways, hiring standards, and lead team development in AI-native practices.

• Usability & UX Research: Own UX research practices and hold final sign-off authority on usability and WCAG AA accessibility standards before release.

• Multi-Modal AI Design: Establish design rules and seamless hand-offs between traditional UI, conversational AI, and agentic workflows.

• Design System & Pipelines: Strategic ownership of the ELMO design system; partner with Engineering to maintain high design-to-code and AI generation accuracy.

• Operations & Commercials: Manage design budgets, headcount, and tool strategy while maintaining tight cross-functional alignment with Product and Engineering.

What We Are Looking For:

• Proven Leadership: Experience setting standards and leading designers across cross-functional squads without becoming a bottleneck.

• Hands-on Craft: A senior-level practitioner capable of personally directing design on complex, novel AI features.

• AI & Multi-Modal Expertise: Strong grasp of conversational AI design, AI-native design tooling, and AI-to-code pipelines.

• Research & System Mastery: Deep knowledge of UX research frameworks, accessibility compliance (WCAG AA), and platform-scale design systems.

• Commercial Acumen: Clear understanding of budget management, headcount planning, and tying design outcomes to business impact.

Personal Attributes:

Multi-modal AI experience design-

• Deep understanding of how AI experiences compose across modalities — traditional UI, conversational, agentic, and generative UI.
• Can set the design heuristics that determine when each modality is right, design clean hand- offs between them, and maintain persona and context across modes. Includes fluency in conversational design (multi-turn flows, tone, error recovery) as one component of the broader accountability.

AI-native design transformation-

• Deep understanding of what AI-native design looks like in practice— not just AI tool adoption, but the fundamental shift in how designers direct, evaluate, and refine output. Can articulate the vision, set measurable targets (accuracy, generation cycle time, refinement quality), and coach the team through the transition.

Design system architecture-

• Expert in design system architecture at platform scale, components, tokens, patterns, accessibility compliance, and the rules that generate consistent interfaces.
• Understands the design system as a product served to designers and AI tools, not a static asset.

Apply now and be part of the team shaping the future of work at ELMO!

ELMO Software Pty Ltd is an equal opportunity employer, and we encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to join our team - a commitment reflected in our Reconciliation Action Plan.
As the first software company in Australia and New Zealand to achieve ISO 42001:2023 Certification, we're passionate about responsible, secure and safe AI. Key to this role is an awareness of data privacy and security, as you'll be working with sensitive employee data in accordance with our ISO 27001:2022 Certified security policies.