Senior Product Designer

Cadmus; Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Work Your Way: hybrid with MelbourneHQ

Real Ownership

Career Growth

Inclusive Environment

Job summary

Cadmus is seeking a Senior Product Designer to elevate the Cadmus platform with premium visuals, polished interactions, and scalable design systems. You bridge deep systems thinking with elite visual execution and own core areas end-to-end.

You will collaborate closely with engineers to lock in micro-interactions, borders, and padding as shipped code, while balancing craft with pragmatic shipping and user insights.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing complex SaaS or premium digital products.
• Impeccable visual taste and typography, layout, and micro-interactions.
• Portfolio with live shipped products showing execution and detail.

Responsibilities

• Own core platform areas end-to-end and raise aesthetic and interaction quality.
• Lead evolution of design system and visual polish across the Cadmus ecosystem.
• Collaborate with engineers to implement precise visual intent in production.
• Balance high craft with practical, shippable improvements.
• Conduct user research to surface insights guiding usability improvements.

Skills

SaaS design

Design systems

Visual design

Cross-functional collaboration

Frontend collaboration

Tools

Figma

HTML/CSS basics

Job description

The Cadmus platform shapes how millions of students and tens of thousands of academics experience assessment. That is a massive design challenge that goes well beyond wireframes; it requires taking dense institutional workflows and transforming them into interfaces that feel fluid, intentional, and beautiful.

Cadmus is built on the proposition that design is the mechanism of academic integrity. When software is designed beautifully, users trust it implicitly and engage with it deeply. We believe that complex educational software shouldn’t look or feel like a legacy spreadsheet—it should possess the polish, tactility, and visual magic of the world's finest prosumer tools.

We are looking for a Senior Product Designer who is a master of their digital craft. You are someone who bridges the gap between deep systems thinking and elite visual execution. You will own core platform areas end-to-end, raising the aesthetic and interaction bar across the entire Cadmus ecosystem.

What Success Looks Like

In your first year, you will have:

• Elevated the product’s aesthetic and perceived value: You will lead the evolution of the Cadmus design system, introducing a level of visual polish, type hierarchy, and spatial layout that elevates the entire brand. The product won't just function better; it will look and feel premium.
• Injected delight into dense academic workflows: You will take inherently dry workflows—like assessment grading, rubric creation, and analytics tracking—and turn them into visually stunning, tactile, and rewarding user experiences.
• Ensured the "magic" survives production: You will work in lockstep with engineers to ensure that your exact visual intentions—from micro-interactions and transitions to precise border radiuses and padding—are implemented flawlessly in production. The gap between your Figma file and live code will approach zero.
• Balanced high craft with pragmatic shipping: You raise the visual quality bar without relying on speculative, unbuildable concepts. You make deliberate trade-offs, delivering improvements that are both breathtakingly polished and highly practical to build.
• Introduced user insights through a design lens: You conduct research that surfaces non-obvious insights about how students and academics interact with the UI, using those insights to solve complex usability problems beautifully.

Requirements

WHO YOU ARE

Your Visual Craft & Taste

• 8+ years of experience designing complex SaaS, B2B2C, or premium prosumer digital products.
• Impeccable visual taste. You obsess over the fundamentals: typography scales, precise grid systems, subtle gradients, drop shadows, intentional negative space, and responsive layout flows.
• A portfolio that screams "execution." Your portfolio showcases live, shipped products that demonstrate incredible attention to detail, modern UI aesthetics, and micro-interactions. We want to see how your designs move, feel, and reacts

Systems & Interaction Design

• A systems thinker who loves component architecture. You don't just build pages; you build living design systems. You care deeply about states, variables, tokens, and making a design system highly scalable for engineering.
• Mastery of information architecture. You know how to bring clarity to data-dense interfaces without oversimplifying them or hiding utility behind endless dropdowns.

Execution & Collaboration

• Strong product judgment. You know when to fight for a pixel-perfect interaction and when to make a deliberate trade-off to ship a feature.
• Deep engineering alignment. You speak the language of front-end developers. You understand HTML/CSS behaviors, flexbox layouts, and technical constraints, and you use that knowledge to push the boundaries of what can be built beautifully.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a template or kit-bashing job: We aren't looking to just drop in a stock UI kit. We want a designer who brings bespoke visual excellence and unique creative flair to our product.
• Not a concept-only or illustration role: You won’t be designing speculative, unbuildable concepts or marketing landing pages. You’re shipping functional, high-fidelity UI for a core application.
• Not a standard UX-research role: While you will talk to users, your primary output is high-fidelity execution. We need a builder, not a pure strategist.
• Not detached from engineering: Your designs need to be practical, buildable, and developed in close, daily collaboration with engineering.

Benefits

WORKING AT CADMUS

• Work Your Way: We have a flexible, hybrid culture, with 2 anchor days weekly in our Melbourne HQ for when we need to collaborate in person, and the freedom to work from anywhere the rest of the week.
• Real Ownership: You will have a major say in our architecture and our product roadmap.
• Career Growth: We focus on mentoring and planning for your future so you can grow along with the company.
• Inclusive Environment: We value different backgrounds and perspectives. If you love education and technology, you will belong here.