Principal Service Designer

At Qantas, we’re constantly evolving how we design experiences for our customers and employees. As a Principal Service Designer, you’ll play a critical role in shaping the future of the end-to-end travel experience, helping create seamless, connected journeys across our airports, lounges, baggage services, inflight experiences and digital touchpoints.

This is a unique opportunity to influence some of Australia’s most recognisable travel experiences, working across complex operational environments and collaborating with teams spanning customer, digital, operations, airport services, inflight, technology and frontline employees.

As the Principal Service Designer, you will lead strategic service design initiatives across the Ground and Inflight journey. You’ll tackle some of the organisation’s most complex customer and operational challenges, bringing together customer needs, business goals and operational realities to design services that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Working across experiences such as Prepare to Fly, Check-in, Baggage, Airport Transfers, Lounges, Boarding, Inflight and Arrivals, you’ll identify opportunities to improve journeys end-to-end, creating experiences that feel connected regardless of channel, touchpoint or team.

Beyond delivery, you’ll play a critical role in advancing service design capability across Qantas. You’ll be a visible leader within the design community, helping teams apply service design practices effectively, coaching others and demonstrating how design creates measurable value for customers, employees and the business.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead strategic service design initiatives across the end-to-end travel journey, from pre-travel planning through to arrival.
• Frame and solve complex customer and operational challenges spanning physical, digital and human touchpoints.
• Develop service blueprints, ecosystem maps, journey maps and future-state experience visions where appropriate.
• Apply the right methods to the problem, recognising that every initiative requires a different approach and level of rigour.
• Balance strategic thinking with practical delivery, ensuring recommendations are actionable and capable of creating real-world impact.
• Identify pain points, opportunities and systemic improvements across airport and inflight experiences.
• Facilitate cross-functional workshops that align stakeholders around customer needs, operational realities and business priorities.
• Translate research and operational insights into actionable recommendations and tangible outcomes.
• Partner with Product, Design, Operations, Technology and frontline teams to bring service concepts to life.
• Build confidence and capability in service design practices across teams and disciplines.
• Coach and mentor designers, helping elevate service design maturity across Qantas.
• Influence senior leaders and decision-makers through compelling storytelling, evidence and strategic thinking.
• Establish meaningful measures of success and demonstrate the value and impact of design initiatives over time.
• Champion customer-centred design while balancing operational, commercial, regulatory and technical considerations.

What you’ll bring:

• Extensive experience leading service design programs within large, complex organisations.
• Deep expertise in service design, systems thinking and human-centred design, coupled with the judgement to know when and how to apply different methods.
• A pragmatic approach to problem-solving, with a focus on creating outcomes rather than producing artefacts.
• Strong leadership and influencing skills, with the ability to build alignment across diverse stakeholder groups.
• Demonstrated experience shaping organisational capability and helping others adopt customer-centred ways of working.
• Proven ability to communicate the value of design and connect design outcomes to customer, employee and business results.
• Exceptional facilitation, coaching and storytelling skills.
• Experience working across both digital and physical experiences, connecting channels into cohesive end-to-end journeys.
• Strong commercial awareness and the ability to balance customer needs with operational realities.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity, complexity and organisational change.

Why you’ll love this role:

This role offers the opportunity to influence experiences that millions of customers interact with every year. You’ll work on highly visible initiatives that span airports, lounges, inflight experiences and digital products, helping shape the future of travel at scale.

As a Principal Service Designer, you’ll not only deliver impactful work, you’ll help define how service design is practised across Qantas. You’ll elevate capability, influence strategy and demonstrate the value of design through meaningful outcomes for customers, employees and the business.