The client
Buddy Advisory is proud to be partnering with Propel Ventures, the AI transformation partner for ambitious Australian businesses. Propel rewires how organisations work: operating model, ways of working, capability and governance, so AI changes the work, not just the toolkit.
With a team of around 50 in Australia, they work with clients ranging from high-growth founders to ASX listed enterprises and are well positioned as the market shifts from AI experimentation to meaningful transformation.
The role
This is a hands-on design role with a practice-building dimension. You'll use AI tools daily to design customer experiences across mobile and web; research, interaction design, high fidelity UI, and developer handoff. But beyond your own craft, you'll define how design works inside an AI-native delivery methodology, and help Propel's clients lift theirs. You'll work across multiple client engagements simultaneously, embedded in delivery teams alongside engineers and PMs. You're not inheriting a design process, you're building one, and scaling it.
The responsibilities
- Use AI tooling (Figma AI, v0, Cursor) to handle production work: first-pass screens, flows, prototypes, so you focus on systems thinking, interaction patterns, and critique.
- Run continuous discovery; user interviews, usability tests, competitive analysis, using AI-assisted synthesis to get to insight faster.
- Build and maintain a shared design system: versioned, token-driven, treated like a product.
- Work closely with engineers on implementation: design-to-code workflows, handoff, and reviewing shipped work against design intent.
• Define Propel's AI-native design process and scale it across internal squads and client engagements. • Advise clients on lifting their design practices: tooling, process, capability, as part of Propel's embedded delivery model.
The requirements
- 5+ years designing mobile and web experiences end to end, research through to shipped product, with experience shaping design process, not just executing within one.
- AI-native: you use AI tools daily, have a working stack, and have opinions about what's good for what.
- Strong systems thinking; you work in components, tokens, and patterns. You've built or meaningfully contributed to a design system.
- Research fluency: you can plan, run, synthesise, and present findings that change decisions.
- Comfortable in developer-adjacent workflows; Git, PRs, Storybook. This is how designers work at Propel.
- Clear, direct communicator across PM, engineering, and senior stakeholders.
- Consultancy or agency experience, and/or AI product design, is highly regarded.
Why join
- Define how an AI-led consultancy does design, you're building the process from scratch and scaling it across Propel and its clients.
- Propel's clients include Netwealth, AGL, MYOB, ReadyTech, and Education Horizons. You'll work on real products with real users, not internal tools or pitch decks.
- Every person at Propel operates AI-enabled as standard; you won't spend time convincing anyone AI matters; you'll spend it pushing the practice forward.
- ~50 people, small enough for direct access to founders and leadership, big enough for the work to be serious.
- Melbourne or Sydney based, hybrid with a minimum of 3 days in-office.
Remuneration guidance: $130 - 160K + superannuation.
Apply now. Applications close 5pm, Tuesday July 7.
