Lead Application Designer

At Specsavers, we know that to reach your full potential you need to work somewhere that brings out your best. We pride ourselves on offering a supportive, driven, flexible and inclusive culture.

In 2025, we were proudly recognised as one of Australia’s Best Places to Work for the third consecutive year and ranked 12th on Fortune’s list of the World’s 25 Best Workplaces. Here’s a taste of just some of our perks:

• Quarterly bonus scheme
• Two free pairs of glasses each year
• On-site free parking
• Birthday, Volunteer, Professional Development and Paid Parental Leave
• Health and wellbeing programs
• Fully funded social club offering a wide range of activities throughout the year

If you like the sound of working for a company dedicated to improving the lives of its people and customers, we think you would look good at Specsavers.

The role

Lead modern enterprise application design across ANZ, guide solutions through formal design governance, and build an accountable, high-performing design team.

As Lead Application Designer, you will lead the ANZ application design function and a team of Solution Designers and Analyst Programmers. Working with our global team, you will set the ANZ direction for application design, align your team with our standards and patterns, and be accountable for the quality, timeliness and practicality of the design outcomes produced by your people.

This is a hands-on design leadership role. You will translate complex business needs into build-ready solutions, guide material decisions through formal design review and approval forums, and partner with local and global architects, engineers, delivery teams, vendors and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, resilient and commercially sound outcomes.

What you'll be doing

• Lead, coach and develop a team of Solution Designers and Analyst Programmers, setting clear expectations and building capability, ownership and consistent delivery performance.
• Own the quality of solution design outcomes across the team, ensuring designs are complete, practical, build-ready and delivered with the required artefacts, assumptions, dependencies and handover detail.
• Translate high-level concepts and business requirements into detailed application and integration designs for developers and systems integration partners.
• Apply modern architecture approaches and patterns, including API-led, event-driven, service-based, microservices, SaaS, distributed and composable architectures, selecting patterns based on business and technical needs rather than technology preference.
• Guide designs through Specsavers’ formal governance and approval process, including peer review, architecture and design governance boards, and engagement with global architecture and solution design teams for material decisions.
• Review internal and partner-produced designs for quality, compliance, security, scalability, resilience, operability and alignment with enterprise and global standards.
• Maintain clear application and integration artefacts, including low-level designs, Interface Control Documents, domain models, dependency maps and current-state and target-state views.
• Provide design leadership throughout delivery by resolving risks, clarifying design intent, addressing complex issues and preventing avoidable rework.
• Partner with technical and business stakeholders across Australia, New Zealand and global teams to align priorities, manage dependencies and progress decisions through collaboration.
• Promote continuous improvement, modern delivery practices and ongoing professional development across the application design function.

What we're looking for

• Proven recent experience leading and line-managing a technical design team, with accountability for performance, capability development, coaching and the quality of team outcomes.
• At least five years’ experience in a Lead Application Designer, Solution Architect or comparable enterprise design leadership role.
• Demonstrated ownership of end-to-end solution design in complex enterprise environments, from requirements and options assessment through detailed design, governance approval and delivery support.
• Strong practical knowledge of architecture and integration patterns, modern cloud-based platforms, API-led, event-driven, service-based and microservices architectures, plus the judgement to choose the right pattern for the problem.
• Experience working within formal architecture and design governance, presenting material decisions to review boards and securing approval against enterprise standards and strategic roadmaps.
• Ability to produce and assure clear, build-ready design artefacts using appropriate modelling approaches such as UML or C4.
• Broad exposure to modern cloud, SaaS, integration, DevOps and enterprise application technologies, together with the ability to work effectively across modern and legacy environments.
• Strong commercial judgement, balancing strategic direction, delivery practicality, cost, risk, resilience, performance and business value.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and influencing skills across technical, business, vendor and globally distributed teams.
• A strong commitment to continuous learning, supported by recent development, relevant certifications or clear evidence of keeping skills current.

Highly regarded: experience with Finance, ERP or supply chain platforms; Azure and Microsoft ecosystems and certifications; REST, SOAP, messaging and integration technologies; and modern front-end or composable architectures.

About us:

Specsavers is the market leader for eye tests, the retailer of choice for contact lenses and one of the fastest-growing hearing providers in Australia and New Zealand. We are on a continual mission to transform eye and hearing health by helping eliminate preventable vision loss and blindness through improved prevention and early detection, while providing accessible and affordable hearing care.

At Specsavers, we believe a diverse, inclusive and flexible culture enables our people to bring their whole selves to work and be proud of doing so. We understand that one size does not fit all, and our flexible working approach supports our people to balance their careers with the other important things in life.

Creating a great place to work is central to who we are, and our behaviours guide how we make a difference every day.