Head of Conversation Design

Help us build the Contact Centre of the future.

Are you the right applicant for this opportunity Find out by reading through the role overview below.

VERSA AI is a fast-growing AI start-up designing and deploying GenAI voice agents that create natural, human-like conversations between people and machines. Australian founded and rapidly expanding worldwide, we help enterprise clients deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale, and at lower cost.

We are looking for a Head of Conversation Design, based in the US, to lead our global design practice and set the standard for how conversational AI is designed, delivered and continuously improved for some of the world's largest brands.

About the Role

You will lead a globally distributed team across Australia, the US and Europe, made up of forward-deployed conversation designers embedded with enterprise clients and a platform-focused R&D function that builds the prompting patterns, tools and design frameworks the whole practice runs on.

Your team owns the craft. Every voice and chat agent VERSA ships carries your team's fingerprints, and the quality bar you set is what customers experience on every call. You will be equally comfortable in a boardroom explaining design decisions to a CX executive and in a prompt file working out why an agent mishandled a transfer.

As our design leader in North America, you will also be a visible presence in our fastest-growing market, partnering closely with sales and delivery leadership as we scale US accounts.

What You'll Own

• Global design practice build, lead and grow a distributed team of conversation designers across Australia, the US and Europe. Hiring, capability development, career progression and an operating rhythm that genuinely works across time zones.
• Craft and quality standards define what great looks like at VERSA. Design principles, review and QA processes, tone and persona frameworks, documentation standards and the guardrails that keep quality consistent whether an agent is designed in Melbourne, Denver or Dublin.
• Enterprise delivery act as the senior design voice on VERSA's most complex and highest-stakes engagements. Shape solutions during pre-sales, steer scoping and design direction, and step in personally when an engagement needs experienced hands.
• Platform direction partner with the R&D Design Lead, Product and Engineering to decide what the conversation design platform needs next, turning patterns your team discovers in client work into reusable platform capability.
• Performance and continuous improvement own how VERSA measures conversation quality. Containment, resolution, escalation behavior, customer sentiment and the evaluation loops that turn live conversation data into design improvements.
• Commercial impact work with Sales and Customer Success to translate design capability into client value, contribute to proposals and roadmap conversations, and represent VERSA's design thinking externally.

What We're Looking For

Must Have:

• Proven experience leading conversation design, CX design or UX teams, including hiring, developing and retaining senior designers. You have managed people and you enjoy it.
• Deep hands-on conversation design background across voice and chat, with a real understanding of how dialogue systems behave, where they fail and how to design around those failure modes in production.
• Practical fluency with Gen AI and large language models: prompt architecture, system prompt design, agentic flow design, RAG patterns, fallback and guardrail logic and LLM behavior diagnostics. You can review your team's work in detail and make it better.
• Credibility with enterprise stakeholders. You can hold a room of client executives, explain design trade-offs in business terms and build trust quickly on high-stakes programs.
• Experience delivering client-facing work in a consulting, agency or forward-deployed model, balancing multiple accounts and competing priorities without dropping the quality bar.
• Comfort with ambiguity and start-up pace. You build the process that is missing rather than waiting for it, and you validate ideas through prototyping and testing. xhyhwjd
• Genuine enthusiasm for leading a globally distributed team, including a workable overlap with Australian and European working hours.

Nice to have:

• Voice and telephony experience, and familiarity with the specific constraints of voice-based AI interactions
• Understanding of how enterprise contact centers operate
• Experience with LLM evaluation and observability tooling
• Experience in regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, government or utilities, and the compliance and governance requirements that shape how AI can be deployed in high-stakes environments
• Experience scaling a design practice through a period of rapid headcount growth
• Multi-market, multi-language or localization design experience

Why VERSA AI?

• High-growth start-up with a dynamic, innovative culture
• Lead the design practice behind the contact centers of the future, with real authority over the craft
• A seat at the table as we scale our US presence
• Competitive salary and benefits
• Fully remote-first and highly flexible working environment
• A diverse and inclusive team where your voice genuinely matters

If you are passionate about the future of AI, love crafting conversations that actually work and want to lead a team making a meaningful impact at a company moving fast, we would love to hear from you.