About ELMO Software: Founded in 2002, ELMO Software is the trusted provider of HR technology solutions to 2,000+ mid-sized organisations and more than one million end users across Australia and New Zealand. With a comprehensive suite of ISO-certified solutions that span the full employee lifecycle, ELMO Software is designed to scale as organisations grow. Flexible and configurable, ELMO’s one-stop HRIS fits to your specific needs and workflows. Through powerful technology, automation, data and analytics, ELMO Software empowers HR professionals to play an integral role in company decision making. About the Opportunity: Reporting to the VP, 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. Product Designers and Senior Product Designers report directly to this role and are matrixed into cross-functional squads, mirroring how Product and Engineering operate. In the AI-Native model, the Head of Design ensures that AI-accelerated design generation translates into measurable improvements in usability, accessibility, and design system fidelity, not just faster pixels. ELMO operates a product-led model. Product owns whether we build the right thing for the customer (desirability) and whether the business can support it commercially (viability). Engineering owns whether it can be built sustainably (feasibility). Design owns whether the experience works for users (usability). The Head of Design owns the standard, the system, and the people that make ELMO's interfaces usable, accessible, and on-brand and ensures design serves all squads equitably as an independent discipline. Product research (should we build this, will customers pay for it, does it solve a real problem) sits with Product. UX research (does the experience meet usability benchmarks, do users understand it, where do they get stuck, are accessibility outcomes met) sits with Design and is owned by the Head of Design. Multi-modal experience design is a first-class accountability of this role. As ELMO brings AI-native capabilities into the platform (conversational, agentic, and generative UI), the Head of Design owns the rules for how these modalities compose with traditional UI; when each is the right choice, how they hand off to one another, and how state and context flow across modes to produce a coherent, usable product. Conversational AI is currently the most prominent of these modalities and a key formative challenge for the discipline. This role operates at approximately 35% tactical / 40% strategic / 25% management. The Head of Design is hands-on by design and directs design personally on the highest-leverage strategic initiatives (typically the most novel or risky AI surface in any given quarter), holds the bar through craft, and leads the discipline through standards, the design system, and direct development of the team. Desired Skills and Experience The core responsibilities of the Head of Design includes: Design Leadership & Culture:
• Accountable for design culture across the organisation: usability rigour, accessibility-first thinking, design system discipline, and continuous improvement in AI-native design practice.
• Owns the design career ladder: role definitions, promotion criteria, and career development frameworks for all design roles (Product Designer, Senior Product Designer).




• Sets and maintains design standards across all squads
- design system compliance, accessibility, AI design principles (aligned with ISO 42001), annotation quality, AI direction technique, and usability validation rigour.
• Owns design hiring strategy: capability requirements, interview standards, hiring bar, AI-native design portfolio expectations, and onboarding quality.
• Drives design employer brand and talent attraction in a market where AI-native design fluency is the new baseline. Usability Accountability:
• Accountable for the usability quality of every interface ELMO ships.
• Owns the usability risk framework: defines what triggers lightweight validation (heuristic / corridor) versus moderated UX research for Rocks and novel interaction patterns, and ensures it is applied consistently.
• Owns final-call authority on usability decisions at the release gate escalation point when squad-level UX fidelity sign-off is contested or ambiguous.
• Accountable for accessibility outcomes across the product portfolio
- WCAG AA compliance is the standard, with no regression introduced through AI pipelines. UX Research Practice:
• Owns the UX research practice across the design discipline
- usability testing, comprehension testing, accessibility validation, and benchmark measurement against the experience standards Design sets.
• The boundary is clear: UX research validates whether the experience works (usability, comprehension, accessibility); product research validates whether to build (desirability, viability). Product owns product research; Design owns UX research. The process needs to run together not as 2 different processes.
• Defines UX research methods and cadence
- when heuristic / corridor is sufficient, when moderated usability testing is required for Rocks, and when platform-level benchmark studies are run (e.g., periodic usability benchmarks on key flows; recurring accessibility audits).
• Drives investment in UX research tooling and capability so research moves at AI-build cadence
- research must keep up with accelerated delivery, not become the bottleneck that throttles it.
• Sets the standard for how UX research findings are documented, shared, and fed back into design system evolution
- research that doesn't change anything has no value. Multi-Modal Experience Design:
• Accountable for the design rules that govern how ELMO's product surfaces compose, when traditional UI is right, when conversation is right, when agentic flows are right, and how state and context move between modes.
• Owns the design of hand-offs between modalities
- UI to conversation, conversation to UI, conversation to agentic
- and how persona and context are maintained across modes.
• Owns the conversational design system as one component of the multi-modal accountability: tone, persona, multi-turn patterns, clarification behaviour, error recovery, fallback, and the Figma artefacts (or equivalent) that codify these for AI generation and engineering build.




• Sets the validation bar for any AI-generated experience regardless of modality
- accuracy, comprehension, accessibility, and user satisfaction evidenced before ship.
• Partners with Product on multi-modal use case identification and prioritisation, and with the VP of MLOps & Infrastructure on the model, latency, and infrastructure choices that constrain what's designable. AI-Native Design Practice:
• Accountable for the successful adoption and measurable impact of AI-native design practices across all designers.
• Owns the AI design tooling strategy: tool selection, adoption targets, measurement, and continuous improvement of AI direction technique.
• Ensures AI-native practices are embedded in design standards
- directing AI to generate three meaningfully different interaction patterns, AI-driven edge state generation, AI accessibility audit before peer review
- not bolted on as optional extras.
• Tracks and reports on AI adoption metrics for design: tool usage, AI-generated design contribution, refinement cycle time, and accuracy against the design system.
• Identifies and removes barriers to AI adoption
- tooling gaps, skill gaps, prompt-quality gaps, and pipeline configuration issues.
• Co-owns the design-to-code AI pipeline with the Head of Engineering: design-side artefact quality, naming conventions, and component structure that enable reliable AI translation. Life & Culture... At ELMO you will be joining an epic team with the prospect to make a big impact. We foster an authentic, collaborative, fun working environment and being an ELMOnian means you're part of an amazing team that will push you to grow, support you with challenges and allow you to shine. Some of our benefits include:
• Hybrid work set up
• Paid Parental leave
- 12 weeks primary, 6 weeks secondary
• Birthday leave, YOU day each year, as well as connecting people leave (up to 2 weeks working from anywhere)
• Inhouse Learning and Development initiatives
• ELMO Social and Diversity clubs
• Wellbeing initiatives
• Mental Health/EAP programs
• Flare Benefits (great discounts, novated leasing, salary sacrifice) Our values:
• Reimagine What's Possible
- We believe innovation is human at its core. By staying open, fearless, and adaptive, we continuously push boundaries
- while keeping people at the heart of everything we do.
• Obsess over Customers – Everything we do is designed to positively impact our customers.
• Help Others Thrive
- Be they colleagues, communities or customers, we champion ways to help others thrive.
• Be Fearlessly Optimistic
- We bring unwavering positivity to any challenge, as we know it will drive meaningful change. Please note: Our internal Talent Acquisition team has got this covered, we’re not open to using an agency for this role. Sounds like you? Apply now 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 Current 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.

📌 Head of Design (Sydney)
🏢 ELMO Software
📍 Sydney