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Are you a Senior Product Designer who does your sharpest work when handed a real problem and trusted to run with it, who treats research as the route to a point of view rather than a box to tick, and who holds a high bar on craft? We’d love to hear from you.

About Acorn

At Acorn PLMS, we are on a mission to transform the corporate learning experience. Our cutting-edge Performance Learning Management System (PLMS) software is powered by AI and designed to ensure that what people learn directly contributes to their exceptional performance in business. Corporate performance and learning need a revolution, and Acorn PLMS is the antidote. We are the only solution that guides learners step by step to master the specific capabilities required for their roles, ultimately accelerating organisational performance.

Location

We are open to individuals based in Sydney - this is an in-office role.

Role Overview

This is not a brief-takers role, but it is also not a strategy role. Our product direction, philosophy, and design principles are held by the Director of Product Design you work alongside. Within that frame, the problem is yours: you run discovery, form a point of view, design the solution, and work independently with Product Management and engineering to ship it. We are looking for someone who brings insight and craft, and who exercises genuine judgement rather than just execution.

Our Capabilities Framework

The best part… we use our Acorn software at Acorn. We believe in the power of our Leaders and employees being aligned on the 5 capabilities needed for each role, and the level that we expect for any given role, using our Acorn AI tool to streamline this consistently across our business. The 4 levels comprise Foundational, Developing, Proficient and Advanced.

1. Product Strategy, Outcomes & Trade-offs

Solves design problems within a set strategy, and makes high-quality trade-offs that serve the intended outcome. Level — Developing: Understands the product-area goals, principles, and constraints they are given, and aligns design decisions to them. Identifies risks to the outcome early and flags when a brief and the evidence diverge.

2. Insight Synthesis & Problem Framing

Synthesises diverse signals into clear problems and learning plans that steer decisions. Level — Proficient: Triangulates qual, quant, and domain knowledge into crisp problem framing. Uses insight to prioritise bets and stop low-value work. Establishes reliable validation practices for the squad.

3. Complex Interaction Design & Quality

Solves complex interaction problems and sets quality standards within a domain. Level — Proficient: Sets the quality bar in the domain and mentors others in achieving it. Resolves ambiguous interaction problems with strong rationale. Improves accessibility and usability systematically, not incidentally.

4. System Evolution & Reuse

Evolves the system to support scalable, consistent delivery in a domain. Level — Proficient: Expert across Figma and the design system. Owns key patterns, ensures parity between design and code with engineering, and balances consistency with product needs without creating fragmentation. Treats the system as a living asset, not a static library.

5. Stakeholder Alignment & Facilitation

Works independently with cross-functional partners and facilitates high-quality decisions. Level — Proficient: Runs design work directly with Product Management and engineering downstream of briefing, without needing to be chaperoned. Navigates disagreement while maintaining trust and momentum. Aligns partners on cohesive experience decisions and keeps trade-offs visible.

Key Responsibilities

• Own significant design problems end to end, from research and discovery through interaction design, prototyping, and shipped experience, working within the strategy and principles set by the Director of Product Design.
• Run and synthesise your own research. Plan and conduct discovery, user interviews, usability testing, and analysis, and turn it into a clear point of view on what matters and why, not a summary of findings.
• Design for real-world complexity, including permissions, role-based states, empty states, error handling, and edge cases, with handover artefacts that give engineers clarity without guesswork.
• Hold the quality bar. Set and defend a high standard on interaction, visual, and content craft, and resolve ambiguous problems with well-reasoned rationale.
• Own and evolve design system patterns in Figma, ensuring consistency across journeys and parity with engineering, without creating unnecessary constraints.
• Work independently with Product Management and engineering throughout delivery, keeping decisions moving and trade-offs visible, and protecting the experience while meeting delivery realities.
• Apply the platform’s design principles with judgement, knowing when a principle bends and when it must hold, and flagging when something threatens coherence even where no rule has been written for it.
• Review implementations against design intent, identify gaps, and advocate for quality fixes before and after release.

Required Experience

• Substantial Product Design experience with a portfolio that demonstrates end-to-end ownership of complex problems: research, interaction design, prototyping, and delivery. We want to see the problem you were given, the calls you made, what you killed, and why, not only the final screens.
• Significant experience designing SaaS or technology products. This is not negotiable; you should be fluent in the complexity of multi-user, role-based, permission-driven software.
• Expert across the whole of Figma: component-based design, advanced prototyping, variables, and hands-on contribution to a shared design system. Design systems experience is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have.
• Genuine, self-sufficient research capability, with demonstrated expertise running user interviews. You can plan and moderate your own interviews and discovery, ask the questions that surface what people actually do rather than what they say, and turn the result into a decision, without a separate research function holding your hand.
• The ability to absorb a sophisticated design philosophy and apply it faithfully across varied problems, exercising judgement rather than waiting for each call to be made for you.
• Comfort with ambiguity inside a defined frame. You form a hypothesis before anyone asks you to, and you move.
• A proactive bias to action. You take initiative without waiting to be told the next step, spot the work that needs doing, and pick it up. Downstream of briefing, you run.
• A real and current passion for the craft. You keep learning and sharpening your practice as a habit, not an intention, and you stay genuinely curious about where UX, technology, and product are heading.
• Experience in HR tech, learning technology, or other complex enterprise domains is advantageous but not required.

AI Fluency

At Acorn, we use AI across everything we do and are actively building our AI fluency across the business. We are genuinely excited about what AI makes possible in UX design, and we want someone who feels the same way.

In this role, that looks like:

• Using AI to accelerate research synthesis, surfacing patterns across usability sessions, support tickets, and analytics to inform faster, more confident decisions.
• Leveraging AI-assisted design tools to explore patterns, generate variants, and pressure-test solutions earlier in the process.
• Treating AI as leverage on the parts of the work that do not need a human, so your time goes to the research, judgement, and craft that do.

A clear note on tools: AI design tools sit on top of craft, they do not replace it. Fluency with something like Claude Design without genuine Figma and design-systems mastery is a red flag for us, not a substitute. During the process we will ask you to walk us through what you have actually built, the tools you use daily, and the results you have seen.

Why Join Acorn PLMS?

• You will own meaningful design problems in a product used by over 3 million active learners globally, where your decisions have real, visible impact.
• Acorn is an AI-native platform at an exciting stage of scale, so you will be designing at the intersection of learning, performance, and emerging technology.
• You will work directly alongside the Director of Product Design, with the product thinking already done, so your energy goes into the research and craft rather than fighting for a seat at the table.

Location

We are open to individuals based in Sydney, Australia. We are an office-first company, meaning we work from our local offices the majority (if not all) of the time. We want to create cool stuff with great people, and we know from experience that is best done through daily moments like the coffee run, walk to grab lunch, or quick huddles.

Being able to capitalise on this is key to our ongoing success and a large part of the reason we can work at the pace we do. Please note candidates will need to be in commuting distance to our offices based in Sydney CBD (Townhall).

Applicants must have full working rights in Australia to be considered for this role. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.

Our Recruitment Process

Acorn is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and respected. We aim to ensure that our recruitment process is fair and accessible to everyone and encourage candidates to request any accommodations needed during the application or interview stages.

About Acorn

Acorn is the hub for learning and performance for over 3 million active learners globally. The work you do helps real people grow not just professionally, but personally. There’s still so much more to do, and we need people who are keen to help us journey into the next phase! To find out more about life at Acorn, our Values and working with us, check out our website at https://acorn.works and see our Life At Acorn video here! https://youtu.be/2BGUk-n3FrQ?si=U_sS1Y5ZSP0tNtZW