Meet Athena, the Home Loan Wrecker

Athena launched in 2019 with a simple mission: help Aussie borrowers save money and pay down their home loans faster. Our digital mortgage platform radically simplifies the application process, passing on the savings to customers.

Since then, we've grown. We've built Australia's first cloud-native home loan platform covering the full value chain - acquire, originate, service, and fund. And we've expanded our focus beyond direct customers, also partnering with brokers to bring a broad range of lending solutions to more Australians, including specialised lending products that meet diverse borrower needs.

Athena has been recognised with multiple consumer lending and industry awards including Canstar Outstanding Value and Innovation Excellence awards, RateCity and Mozo awards, and Fintech Lender and Fintech CEO of the year.

The Role

Buying or refinancing a property shouldn’t feel like navigating a maze blindfolded. As a Lead Experience Designer, you’ll apply human-centred design thinking to complex, high-impact experiences across our customers, brokers, and internal teams.

A unique part of the role will be redefining how we scale loan origination into the future and create a seamless experience for customers, brokers and our people. You'll balance solving today's problems with shaping tomorrow's vision, prototyping and testing ways of working that improve clarity, accuracy, and speed across our origination and servicing operations. Working embedded with Product, Tech, and Ops, you'll form strong partnerships to help design the future of work at Athena.

This is a hands-on, future-focused, individual contributor role with design leadership but no people management. You’ll lead through craft, systems thinking, and influence, using the right artefacts to align teams around a clear direction and pragmatic next steps.

If you’re already a lead, or a senior designer ready to step into a lead role, owning problems end-to-end and shaping strategy as well as execution, we’d love to hear from you.

You will

Design across customer, broker, and internal experiences

• Apply human-centred design to direct customer experiences, broker facing tools (like our Broker Portal), and internal workflows and processes because great experiences aren't just for end customers.
• Understand the broker journey and design experiences that make partnering with us a competitive advantage.
• Map end-to-end journeys that connect the dots between what customers and brokers see and what operations teams do behind the scenes.

Balance the now with the next

• Solve immediate problems and build iteratively toward a compelling future state vision.
• Prototype and test workflows and solutions that improve clarity, accuracy, and speed; validating ideas before we commit to building them.
• Use your toolkit flexibly (process and flow mapping, systems thinking, service design, or business analysis) to bring the future to life and get stakeholders aligned.

Lead research and discovery

• Plan and conduct user research; understanding how work flows both now and into the future.
• Synthesise insights into actionable opportunities that inform product strategy and operational improvements across all channels.
• Champion evidence-based decision making, turning observations into recommendations that move the needle.

Bring ideas to life

• Develop user and process flows, wireframes, and interactive prototypes to explore and communicate solutions.
• Leverage good UI design to ensure your vision translates into delightful, polished interfaces that customers and teams love to use.
• Define and measure experience success metrics (like task completion, accuracy, time-on-task, satisfaction) and iterate based on what the data tells you.

Form strong cross-functional partnerships

• Build deep connections with Product, Design, Tech, and Ops teams - you're embedded in the work, not designing from the sidelines.
• Run workshops, design sprints, and collaborative sessions to align stakeholders and co-create solutions.
• Communicate design rationale and trade-offs clearly to diverse audiences - from engineers to executives to operations leads.

Experiment and evolve

• Be willing to try new ways of working, whether that's integrating AI agents into workflows, leveraging AI to augment your design process, or rapid prototyping to pilot concepts quickly.
• Contribute to evolving our Design practice, tools, and methods at Athena; we're always looking for better ways.

What we're looking for

• Deep UX expertise - You have 5+ years of experience across the UX toolkit: research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability evaluation. Your portfolio demonstrates end-to-end ownership from discovery to shipped product.
• Comfortable across contexts - You're equally at home designing for end customers, B2B users like brokers, and internal teams. You understand that all deserve great design and that their needs are interconnected.
• Systems thinker - You see how the pieces connect. You understand that great experiences aren't just screens, it's the entire system, including the operational processes and people that make it work.
• Artefact fluency - Process maps, journey maps, service blueprints, system diagrams, wireframes, prototypes - you know how to pick the right tool for the job and use it to bring clarity and alignment.
• Future-focused, pragmatically grounded - You can paint a compelling vision of where we're heading while delivering value incrementally along the way.
• Brilliant communicator - You articulate the "why" behind your decisions and bring people along. You're as comfortable presenting to execs as you are workshopping with an ops team.
• Strong relationship builder - You form genuine partnerships with Product, Tech, and Ops. You're curious about how things really work and people trust you with their problems.
• Experiment-ready - You're excited to try new approaches, including AI-augmented design workflows, rapid prototyping, and piloting emerging tools and methods.
• Visual sensibility - You have an eye for design and can bring your UX intent to life with interfaces that are clear, usable, and delightful.
• Collaborative to the core - No room for egos or elbows. You believe the best work happens when diverse perspectives come together.

Nice to have:

• Experience designing for internal teams in operational, SaaS, or enterprise environments.
• Experience with B2B products, partner portals, or channel/broker ecosystems.
• Background in credit, underwriting, lending operations, or financial services.
• Familiarity with AI tools and a curiosity about how they can augment design work.

What Athena offers

• Inclusive, Flexible and casual working environment
• Hybrid working with HQ Anchor Days in award winning office space
• Wellbeing program to support your physical, mental, social and financial health
• Perks program with access to discounts to every day expenses
• Fantastic team culture with monthly events

You'll be joining an experienced team, passionate about being best in class in everything we do. We have a relaxed and fun atmosphere where you can bring your unique self and skills to help us all grow as a team. Be great, be you, play nice.

At Athena we are committed to a workplace that embraces diversity, equality, and inclusion. Athenians are free to let their own brand of freak fly.

Please be sure to add notifications@app.bamboohr.com to your contact list to ensure delivery of all correspondence from us.

This advertisement will close 28 days from the date of posting. Applicants will be contacted once the application period has closed.