Senior Service Designer

Job Description

We're looking for a strategic, systems-minded Senior Service Designer to join our growing design capability. You’ll work at the heart of multidisciplinary teams to shape end-to-end services that are accessible, efficient, and centred around real user needs.

Service Designers at V1 work across the full service lifecycle, from discovery through to live. You’ll lead on mapping current and future states, aligning digital delivery with policy and operational realities, and helping clients make confident, evidence-based decisions.

You’ll collaborate closely with content designers, interaction designers, product managers, user researchers, business analysts and technical leads. You’ll help shape service visions, facilitate workshops, and define the structures, processes and journeys that underpin great services.

Typical projects

You will work on a range of high-profile digital transformation projects, which could be in a range of sectors including education, training, social care or the criminal justice system. Examples of the projects you could be working on include developing new services to:

• Enable people in prison to receive better and more tailored education and training
• Help local authorities carry out skills assessments on social workers
• Share sensitive information about children between multiple agencies
• Reducing administrative burden of schools and teachers
• Supporting teachers enhance their skills and career development to ensure children get excellent teaching standards
• Ensuring the Teaching Regulation Agency handles teacher data safely and accurately

Qualifications

We’re particularly interested in people who:

• Have experience working to the GOV.UK Service Standard or within the public sector
• Can simplify complexity—cutting through noise to make services usable, scalable, and understandable for teams and users
• Are comfortable working in ambiguity and helping teams find direction
• Can plan and lead workshops and navigate, manage and influence diverse stakeholders
• Understand and design for accessibility and inclusion across channels and touchpoints
• Can define the service vision and unite a team around it
• Feel confident pitching the value of service design to colleagues, clients and stakeholders—including those unfamiliar with it
• Have excellent communication skills, able to adapt information to different audiences and mediums
• Can build a strong evidence base to support design decisions—and clearly explain or defend those decisions when challenged
• Can interpret performance data to make design decisions and inform success metrics to effectively valuate success and impact
• Think beyond the immediate problem to design services that are sustainable, strategic and future-proof
• Visualise complex systems clearly through service blueprints, journey maps or ecosystem diagrams (to name a few) and adapt the output to the audience learning preferences
• Are skilled at navigating difficult conversations, helping teams find common ground, and knowing when to escalate issues constructively
• Work with clients, not just for them—co-creating solutions as one team, and building trusted, respectful partnerships
• Have experience working in agile, multidisciplinary teams
• Are confident with tools like Miro and Lucid with basic level of Figma
• Understand and can effectively use design-thinking, systems thinking and co-design techniques to help guide teams and make decisions

Additional Information

At Version 1, we believe in providing our employees with a comprehensive benefits package that prioritises their wellbeing, professional growth, and financial stability.

• Share in our success with our Quarterly Performance-Related Profit Share Scheme, where employees collectively benefit from a share of our company's profits
• Strong Career Progression & mentorship coaching through our Strength in Balance & Leadership schemes with a dedicated quarterly Pathways Career Development programme
• Flexible/remote working, Version 1 is tremendously understanding of life events and people’s individual circumstances and offer flexibility to help achieve a healthy work life balance
• Financial Wellbeing initiatives including; Version 1 Pension with a 5% employee-matched contribution, Private Healthcare Cover, Life Assurance, Financial advice and an Employee Discount scheme
• Employee Wellbeing schemes including Gym Discounts, Bike to Work, Fitness classes, Mindfulness Workshops, Employee Assistance Programme and much more.
• 24 days holiday allowance plus Public Holidays, enhanced maternity/paternity leave, marriage/civil partnership leave and special leave policies
• Educational assistance, incentivised certifications, and accreditations, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat
• Reward schemes including Version 1’s Annual Excellence Awards & quarterly Star Awards.
• Environment, Social and Community First initiatives allow you to get involved in local fundraising and development opportunities as part of fostering our diversity, inclusion and belonging schemes.

And many more exciting benefits… drop us a note to find out more.

Version 1 is an equal opportunities employer

We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive and respectful workplace where everyone feels valued and able to thrive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and lived experiences, and we value the different perspectives people bring including those shaped by disability and neurodiversity.

We want every candidate to have a positive and accessible recruitment experience. If you need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process, please contact Ashley.Smith@version1.com at Version 1. We will consider all requests carefully, respectfully and confidentially.

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