Senior Service Designer

We’re looking for a Senior Service Designer to join us. This is more than a design role. It’s a chance to enable others to design better services too. You’ll collaborate with policy, product, delivery, and operational teams to align goals, clarify problems, and define what good service truly means.

You’ll be part of a supportive design community that values openness, learning, and practical problem-solving, creating services that are inclusive, resilient, and responsive to change.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will:

• Use research, data, and other evidence to shape coherent services both digital and non-digital.
• Support teams to design services that work end-to-end and front-to-back.
• Work openly and iteratively, creating the conditions for good design.
• Advocate for service design best practice and mentor others.
• Help teams align with departmental goals and user needs.
• Drive awareness of service performance and improvement needs which have resulted in successful service outcomes.
• Analyse and understand user needs, business and policy goals and use storytelling and visualisations to articulate whole services, both end-to-end and front-to-back, across business areas or departments in order to solve complex problems.
• Demonstrate good working knowledge of service design in practice and can establish and maintain service design methods including guidance, tools and patterns, your team can use to solve complex problems and reach outcomes.
• Lead communication with stakeholders at varying levels of seniority and facilitate conversations, collaboration and consensus that support the team strategy, drive decision-making and achieve outcomes across teams and business areas.
• Support the DWP service design community by, contributing to meet-ups to create connections and share work openly, actively supporting and mentoring team members, promoting the capability of service design in and beyond the department and participating in recruitment activities.

When giving details in your employment history and personal statement you should highlight your experience in line with essential criteria below:

• Lead criterion – Have substantial experience of using hands-on service design approaches to solve complex problems.
• Demonstrate user-centred design expertise to develop end-to-end, front-to-back services using Government principles and evidence that meet citizen and colleague needs as well as department objectives.
• Be comfortable influencing and communicating to a range of colleagues and stakeholders at varying levels of seniority on the value of user centricity, your approaches and decisions.
• Contribute to and support the creation and maintenance of a positive working environment that enables collaboration within your team, the wider department and the service design community.