About Kernl

Kernl is an Australian software company building intuitive AI tools for aged and disability care providers so they can specialise in people, not admin. Our tools are designed to be used by both frontline workers and central team members, and are built with enterprise-grade security, meeting the needs of organisations that handle sensitive information.

The Kernl team has deep experience in delivering care and support having built disability tech services since the roll out of the NDIS over a decade ago. We are also family members and advocates of people with disability.

The easiest way to understand Kernl and what drives us is to read our founding story.

About the role

The Principal Product Designer is the design leader at Kernl. You own the craft of design and set the bar for it across the company, defining what great looks like and making it the standard everyone builds to. You work across the full stack, from mobile and web through to backend, internal tooling, product marketing, and sales support, taking ideas from first concept through to shipped, polished execution. You build and own the design systems the business relies on, and you make sure every product experience is simple, beautiful, and obsessively centred on the customer.

This is not a conventional design role, and it is not a people-management role. We are looking for an exceptional designer who wants to do the best work of their career and raise the standard of design across everything Kernl builds. You will be a full-stack operator: equipped with modern tooling and expected to do meaningful engineering work, not just hand off finished designs. We will invest in turning you into a genuinely capable engineer, just as you turn the rest of the team into genuinely capable designers. You are deeply ambitious and an obsessive learner, driven to continually expand your capabilities to maximise the impact you can have.

What you’ll do

• Design Craft & Product Experience
  • Set and hold the bar for Kernl's customer experience across mobile and web, keeping a consistently high standard for simple, beautiful, intuitive design.
  • Take ideas from concept through to shipped execution, working across research, interaction design, visual design, prototyping, and the build itself.
  • Bring real judgement about what great looks like, and use it to lift the quality of everything Kernl ships.
  • Continually optimise the customer experience as one connected system, not one screen or flow at a time.
• Design Systems & Capability Building
  • Build, own, and evolve the design systems, components, and patterns used across the entire business.
  • Raise the design capability of everyone at Kernl by coaching, mentoring, and giving the team the tools, language, and standards to design well themselves.
  • Turn great design into a repeatable way of working across Kernl, not something that depends on one person being in every conversation.
• Full-Stack Execution
  • Do meaningful hands-on engineering work, shipping production-quality changes across frontend, mobile, and backend.
  • Fully embrace AI-native ways of working, using modern tools to dramatically increase the quality, speed, and scope of what you can deliver.
  • Balance speed of delivery against maintainable, consistent, reusable foundations that reduce future complexity.
  • Continuously grow your engineering capability, with the team's support, so you can own work from idea through to production.
• Customer Obsession
  • Spend real time with customers to understand their needs, frustrations, and context, then turn what you learn into rapid improvements.
  • Be relentless about the quality of the user experience, and act as the customer's advocate in every decision.
  • Use research, feedback, and usage data to find the highest-impact opportunities to make the product better.
• Cross-Functional Impact
  • Support design across the whole business, from product and product marketing through to sales materials, brand, and customer-facing collateral.
  • Bring design into sales conversations, demos, and onboarding to help win and keep customers.
  • Do whatever needs doing to get great outcomes shipped, working with ownership, agency and pragmatism in a lean team.
• Collaboration & Culture
  • Work closely with the founders to align design, product, and business priorities behind a shared vision.
  • Adopt a business-first mindset, focusing your energy on the problems that matter most to Kernl's growth.
  • Foster a culture of execution, ownership, craft, and continuous improvement.
  • Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and shaping the team as it grows.
  • Adopt and contribute to Kernl’s operating and product principles

What we’re looking for

• 8+ years working on digital products, with a portfolio of work taken from concept to production
• The judgement to know when to polish vs ship
• Experience building design systems and making quality repeatable without you in every review
• Strong product instincts and a willingness to spend time with users and turn what you learn into rapid improvements
• High ownership in a lean team, doing whatever is needed across product, marketing, sales and internal tooling