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 Current 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:

- 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, comp

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