Lead Service Designer

The Role

We are looking for an elite Service Designer / HCD Strategist who has honed their craft at top-tier global innovation and design firms (e.g., IDEO, frog, Fjord, Designit, Government Digital Services, UK) or scaled emerging-market platforms.

You will not be designing isolated apps; you will be mapping and reimagining entire citizen “life events” (e.g., birth, education, starting a business) across highly complex government structures. Your mandate is to cut through bureaucratic friction and design seamless, accessible, and intuitive digital public services that form the backbone of the national digital masterplan.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect Citizen Journeys: Lead the end-to-end service design of core digital public infrastructure. Translate complex legislative and bureaucratic processes into intuitive, human-centric user journeys.
• Design for Scale & Inclusion: Create frameworks and interfaces optimized for extreme diversity, varying levels of digital literacy, and low-bandwidth environments.
• Drive the Gov. Digital Services Vision: Work closely with PDA leadership to define the overarching design systems and user experience standards for all national digital capabilities.
• Cross-Functional Alignment: Act as the bridge between PDA’s design and other stakeholders. Ensure that design fidelity is maintained from concept through to deployment.
• Establish Design Standards: Define and enforce the Tech Architecture Standards & Compliance as it relates to user experience, accessibility, and interface design across all national digital platforms.
• Field Research & Synthesis: Conduct deep, context-rich ethnographic research within Pakistan to ensure solutions are deeply rooted in the actual needs and realities of the population, not just best-practice theory.

The Ideal Candidate

• Experience: 5+ years of intensive service design, human-centered design, or UX strategy experience. A background in a top-tier global design agency is highly preferred, but exceptional candidates from major emerging-market digital product companies will be considered.
• Systems Thinker: Proven ability to map out highly complex, multi-stakeholder ecosystems and synthesize them into clear, actionable service blueprints.
• Pragmatic Visionary: You possess the prestige-level design thinking of a global consultancy, combined with the grit and pragmatism required to ship capabilities in a developing public sector environment.
• Collaborative Leader: Experience navigating complex organizational structures. You know how to defend the user experience while working collaboratively with separate engineering and operations teams.
• Cultural Fluency: A deep understanding of the socio-economic dynamics of Pakistan. (Pakistani nationality is preferred, but we are open to exceptional global talent willing to relocate and deeply immerse themselves in the context).