Lead Service Designer

This role is part of the User-Centred Service Design (UCSD) team. The purpose of our team is to ensure the Bank’s services, products and change initiatives work for the people who rely on them every day. We combine service design, user research, content design and UX/product design to help teams look beyond systems, processes and requirements, and understand the human experiences that sit behind them.

What makes us distinct is that we operate at the intersection of strategy, delivery and people. We work with some of the Bank’s most complex and important programmes, helping teams navigate ambiguity, uncover hidden risks, challenge assumptions and design solutions that are genuinely useful, usable, and adopted by people within the Bank and regulated financial firms.

We are also focused on strengthening the Bank to become a more user-centred organisation. This includes building a Bank-wide community of practice, design standards, training, coaching, and advisory services.

We are a curious, collaborative and pragmatic team. We care deeply about understanding how things really work. We bring together different perspectives and help others see problems in new ways. Our ambition is not simply to deliver good design, but to improve the quality of decision-making, change and service delivery across the Bank.

While the Bank is a public organisation, we are independent of the UK Government and do not follow DDAT or GDS frameworks. We seek practitioners who can adapt their approach to navigate our complex environment, demonstrate flexibility and pragmatism when needed, and bring a proactive, solution-focused mindset to their work.

Service Design at the Bank of England

Service Design at the Bank is concerned with some of the organisation’s most complex challenges. Our service designers work on problems that cut across business areas, technologies and organisational boundaries, helping teams understand how users, data, processes, decisions and services connect.

A typical engagement might involve shaping the future operating model for a major new business function, untangling a complex operational process, or understanding how data moves through the organisation and the services that surround it.

We are looking for someone who is energised by complexity, systems thinking and organisational change, and who is comfortable spending as much time discussing governance, operating models and service delivery as they are user needs and journeys.

Role Overview

We are looking for an exceptional Lead Service Designer to join the User-Centred Service Design team at the Bank of England.

The job is expected to cover three primary responsibilities:

1. Lead Practitioner – A senior service design practitioner who can join a complex programme, identify gaps and opportunities from a user and service perspective, and help stakeholders make better-informed decisions. You will embed user-centred approaches within strategic change initiatives, shape the direction and scope of work, advise on user-centred design resourcing requirements, and influence the design of effective and adoptable solutions. You will also get into the detail on projects, acting as an expert individual contributor.
2. Practice leadership – You will act as the professional lead for the Service Design discipline within the User-Centred Service Design function, accountable for its overall health, quality and continued development. You will help define how Service Design is practised within the Bank, maintaining and evolving the approaches, ways of working, standards and accumulated knowledge that enable the discipline to be effective. As a recognised authority in your field, you will provide professional leadership to service designers across the organisation, supporting them to deliver high-quality work, make sound decisions and grow their capability. You will help identify future capability needs, shape recruitment and succession plans, and ensure the discipline continues to evolve in response to organisational priorities and emerging challenges. You will have line management responsibility of two or more practitioners.
3. A member of the User-Centred Service Design leadership team, helping shape the direction, priorities and effectiveness of the wider function. You will act as a trusted adviser to the Senior Manager, contributing to decisions on strategy, workforce planning, investment, resourcing and organisational priorities. You will bring professional judgement, challenge and perspective to leadership discussions, helping the team navigate complex decisions and maximise its impact across the Bank. You will also represent the User-Centred Service Design function with senior stakeholders and act as an ambassador for user-centred approaches, helping strengthen the function’s reputation, influence and its contribution to organisational change.

About you:

• Curious, inquisitive, open-minded, and interested in diverse perspectives
• Creative problem solver
• A team player
• User-centred
• Passionate about your practice
• Iterative in your approach to shaping and refining solutions
• Able to move between the detail of a service and the wider organisational context
• Natural drive for self-development
• Curious about and embracing of the potential of AI to support your work.

Minimum requirements:

• Significant professional experience as a Service Designer or similar role across a range of organisational and delivery contexts.
• Strong capability across the end-to-end Service Design lifecycle, from understanding complex problems through to implementation and adoption.
• Extensive experience designing end-to-end services and journeys, including both front-stage and back-stage elements.
• Ability to align stakeholders and guide cross-functional teams by building trust, credibility and influence without formal authority.
• Comfortable working within large organisations, navigating complex subject matter, competing priorities and organisational ambiguity.

Essential requirements:

• Experience contributing to the growth of a Service Design discipline or community, including developing others, improving practice, raising quality standards or helping evolve ways of working.
• Experience planning and coordinating service design activity across multiple teams or workstreams, including understanding capability, capacity and dependency requirements, and ensuring the right disciplines are engaged to deliver outcomes.
• Experience providing line management and professional development support to designers, including setting expectations, coaching performance, supporting career development and creating the conditions for them to do high-quality work.
• Systems thinking, with the ability to understand, design and improve complex service ecosystems spanning people, processes, technology, data and organisational structures.
• Strong capability in journey mapping, service blueprinting and service prototyping.
• Experience applying a broad range of Service Design methods and knowing when to use them appropriately.
• Workshop design and facilitation skills, capable of bringing together diverse stakeholder groups and driving meaningful outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to synthesise complexity and tell compelling, evidence-based stories, adapted to different audiences and contexts
• Proven ability to advocate for user-centred approaches and gain support across a wide range of stakeholders, including senior leaders, or where resistance is stringer
• Comfortable working in situations where the problem, solution or path forward is not immediately clear, turning unclear organisational problems into practical options and decisions.
• Evidence of Service Design outcomes through examples, case studies, presentations or portfolio, showing how your work has supported delivery teams to move from strategy and design intent into practical, adoptable change.

Desirable:

• External credibility and thought leadership
• Degree or formal qualification in Service Design or a related discipline.
• Experience working in a highly regulated environment.
• Experience designing services involving complex data, analytics or information ecosystems.