Safe and Together Institute Product Designer (Australia Based) Remote · Full time Company website

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We help professionals and organizations transform their response to domestic abuse practice through innovative training, tools and technology that unify systems in support of safe, stable families. We are a remote first company with a track record of positive change in more than a dozen countries around the world.

PRODUCT DESIGNER

Safe & Together Institute  |  Full-time  |  Remote (Australian Based)

ABOUT SAFE & TOGETHER INSTITUTE

Safe & Together Institute is a global social impact organisation specialising in domestic abuse–informed systems change. For more than 20 years we have worked with child welfare systems, courts, health services, and practitioner communities to shift how professionals understand and respond to domestic abuse — keeping children safe by keeping them with the non-abusive parent wherever possible.

Our Safe & Together™ Model is supported by research and has been adopted by organisations including the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, the New York State child protection agency, and the Scottish national government; its effectiveness for First Nations and other historically marginalised communities has been consistently affirmed by research and community feedback. We are now transitioning from a training organisation to a systems-change organisation — integrating evidence, technology, and partnerships to embed the Model across agencies and sectors.

Our work is carried through training curricula, online learning, assessment tools, credentials, and consulting. These are complex knowledge products, built on a rigorous practice model, for practitioners and systems leaders navigating high-stakes decisions, with real impact on children, families and communities. We are now building a formal product management function for the first time, and this role sits inside that developing team — a new position that will play a key part in shaping what the function becomes.

THE ROLE 

This is a product design role, sitting specifically at the intersection of product design and learning experience design. You will work as part of a product team to take S&TI's existing and new training and learning products (both in-person and online trainer-led, and asynchronous e-learning) and shape their future: their structure, sequencing, delivery format, and visual finish.

This is not a subject-matter or model-specific content-writing role, although limited content-writing tasks may arise on particular projects. The Safe & Together Model's content already exists, supported by a dedicated fidelity tool and by product team members who know it deeply. What's missing is someone who can work within our team to take that content, lead design research and evaluation, and work alongside others to define, design, and develop both new and existing products within the Safe & Together ecosystem — this role is critical in envisioning the future of products in this space, working out how they should be structured and what format they should take, while holding both the systems-change purpose of these products and the impact on the learners, systems, and leaders who use them. 

Our double bottom line means our development process must keep in view both the learner who is the user, and the family which is the beneficiary — the design quality is what connects them. In practice, that means design research in this role reaches beyond practitioners: it includes direct, ethical engagement with survivors and with communities disproportionately affected by the systems we work in, as a core and expected part of the job, not an occasional or optional extension of it.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Project-specific, end-to-end design within S&TI's product portfolio, working in a collaborative way with the rest of the product team — your work will touch every aspect of our process, from structural logic, through research, to visual and interaction finish — on products of every kind: courses, credentials, guides, e-learning modules, tools, and more.
• Reshaping existing content for purpose. Locked, fidelity-checked content gets condensed, restructured, or reformatted for a new audience or format largely through AI, working from your direction — you decide what the reshaping needs to achieve, direct the work, collaborate with the subject matter experts, and judge whether the result actually serves the learner, without needing to author new model-specific subject matter yourself.
• Project-specific design. You bring together user research and make recommendations on how products could be structured and sequenced, and how they should function and feel to use.
• Collaborative design. You know how to work well with others, leading exploratory and synthesis sessions with those who are less confident in the design process. 
• Judgement on delivery format. You make recommendations on when content may better serve the learner as a video, an interactive element, a printed handout, or a digital companion guide — calibrated to the right learner  audience, where any new format needs to add real value, not novelty.
• A consistent visual and design language across the portfolio, in line with the emerging design principles and practices of the product team.
• Design methods as normal practice — user research, journey mapping, prototyping, including direct, ethical engagement with survivors, practitioners, and cultural experts — sometimes run by you, sometimes as a participant, but always a core part of the role, not a one-off exercise.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT

This role does not carry subject-matter expertise in the Safe & Together Model, and it is not expected to write original training content. That expertise sits with our Subject Matter Experts, the model's authors, and a pool of contracted subject matter specialists — including lived experience and cultural experts, certified trainers, Regional Managers, and others — brought in as specific products need them. Your job is to design around content that has already been developed and fidelity-checked, not necessarily to originate it — you will have subject matter expertise support on those projects.

HOW THIS ROLE CONNECTS

You report to the Senior Product Manager (SPM), an experienced design leader who has built this team from scratch during 2026. Day to day, you work closely with:

• the SPM, on product briefs, design direction, design work, and prioritisation;
• subject matter and fidelity expertise — held by the SPM, the CEO, Head of Partnering, and the Subject Matter Lead — brought in at defined points to review content and confirm model alignment;
• the wider product team, who hold day-to-day project management, product development, fidelity checking, and QA, across their own projects and products 
• Global Client Services, your closest source of insight into how products land with learners in real time and what impacts the products make in the field.

This is not a solo contributor role. You will need to collaborate well across timezones and global cultures to work with people who hold deep expertise you don't share, and hold your own design perspective clearly in that dynamic. You'll also need to work as both an independent thinker and a close collaborator, and flex comfortably between the two depending on the project.

HOW THIS ROLE USES AI

AI is a standing part of how the product team works, not an occasional tool. The team runs on a shared Claude Project loaded with the Product Lifecycle Framework, the Playbook, and S&TI's organisational context, used daily for research and synthesis, drafting, and document production at every stage of a product's life. A custom-built fidelity tool checks written and visual content for alignment with the Safe & Together Model, and the team is actively refining it based on real use.

In this role, you'll use AI as a genuine part of your design practice: drafting and iterating on design briefs and content options, structuring research findings, gathering and analysing input from learners, product users, and cultural experts at scale — with careful, ethical handling wherever that input touches lived experience of abuse — running work through the team's fidelity tool ahead of review, and using it to move faster through the mechanical parts of the job, leaving more time for what designers do best: collaborate, ideate, and use critical thinking to drive impact.

What we're hiring for is that judgement, critique, and creative direction — the ability to direct AI well, evaluate what it gives you honestly, and be clear about what you did yourself versus what you handed off to an AI work flow. As a working principle: if AI can already do a piece of this work well, this role exists to direct and judge that output — not to do it by hand. The parts of the job that don't offload are the parts we're actually hiring for.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL

• Approximately 3–5 years of relevant professional experience in product design, service design, UX design, learning experience design or a closely related field. 
• End-to-end product/service design experience — you have led design on a product/service from problem framing through to a finished, polished output.
• Instructional design or learning experience design capability (formal or informal) — you understand how to structure and sequence learning content for adult learners, alongside broader product and UX thinking.
• Experience designing for/alongside social services, community services, health, housing, or a similarly complex human-services sector — as a practitioner, service designer, consultant, or learning experience designer. This matters more to us than direct domestic-violence-sector experience; we need someone who understands the complexity and challenges of these global systems.
• An instinct for double-lens design: you understand that the learner using our products is often a professional, but the beneficiary is the family and survivor whose safety depends on how well that professional is equipped. You keep both in view, so the material reflects the needs of the people affected and not only the needs of the professionals using it — and you treat consulting those affected as part of the design process, not an afterthought.
• Comfort designing around existing content rather than authoring it — you can take material that already exists, work out its best structure, format, and delivery, and make recommendations for condensing or adjusting it, working collaboratively with others to protect model fidelity, without needing to be the subject-matter expert.
• Judgement on modality — you know when a new format (digital, interactive, video) genuinely improves a learning experience, and when it's better left alone for an audience that isn't tech-forward.
• Confident, frequent direction of AI tools in your own design practice, paired with honest, critical review of what they produce — you can tell the difference between a good first draft and something that just looks finished, and you don't let the second kind through.
• A habit of reflecting on and improving your own process — you treat how you work with design practices, AI, and collaborators generally  as something you refine over time, not a fixed skill you've already nailed.
• Comfortable moving between the strategic design question (what should this product be?) and the fine detail (how should this screen or page behave?) in the same week.

NICE TO HAVE

• UI/UX craft for e-learning or online tooling/platform work — usability, click-through, page experience.
• Strong understanding of strategic design methodology — thinking about how products work together as part of a larger product ecosystem and play a role in driving global impact.
• Experience building a design system and visual language.
• Familiarity with domestic violence, trauma-informed practice, or the Safe & Together Model specifically — not required (see Domain Learning below).

DOMAIN LEARNING

You do not need to know the Safe & Together Model before you start. You do need to be willing to learn it deeply and treat that as part of the job. Genuine, demonstrated learning in a specialist domain — community services, law, medicine, education, policy, or another human-services field — matters more to us than direct domestic-violence-sector experience.

SUCCESS AT 12 MONTHS

• Products across the portfolio show a consistent design quality and visual identity that reflects our standing as a global institute.
• The SPM can hand you a design brief and trust it will be held to a high standard, without staying close to every decision.
• A design system or visual language exists for the product portfolio and is genuinely in use.
• At least one product has been meaningfully redesigned — not just reformatted — for a new audience or delivery format, with your design support, under the guidance and support of the SPM.
• Design methods (user research, prototyping, journey mapping) are normal practice in how the product team works, not one-off exercises.
• You are a trusted contributor when the team is working through difficult design questions  — and can explain clearly what you bring to a piece of work that AI alone could not.
• Design decisions across the portfolio can be traced to direct input from practitioners, survivors, and cultural experts — success here is measured by whose voice shaped the work, not by visual or technical polish alone.
• You can speak clearly to how your design choices support scalability and the organisation's growth alongside their quality and model fidelity — holding the double bottom line in the work itself, not just as a stated value.

WORKING AT SAFE & TOGETHER INSTITUTE

We are a small, globally distributed team doing work that matters. The product function is new — you will be building it alongside us, not stepping into an established practice. That takes independence and real investment in the mission.

The product team works across three different continents currently so there is a lot of flexibility in the role around hours. Work life balance is important to us and we work hard to balance that with our desire to connect and work face-to-face across timezones at least a few times a week, this does mean early and/or late meetings from time to time to ensure we can stay connected. 

We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable global team, and to a domestic abuse–informed workplace. We strongly encourage applications from people with lived experience of domestic abuse, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse or system-impacted communities. We value the leadership and knowledge of Indigenous peoples in keeping families safe and connected, and we seek to learn from and work alongside communities everywhere we operate.

EMPLOYMENT DETAILS

Full-time position.

Employer: David Mandel and Associates Pty Ltd, trading as Safe & Together Institute

Employment: Full-time, 38 hours per week, remote within Australia

Salary: AUD $90,000–$125,000 plus superannuation at the applicable statutory rate

Eligibility: Applicants must have unrestricted working rights in Australia 

HOW TO APPLY

Please apply directly on Safe and Together Institutes website.