Midweight Service Designer

Leeds, United Kingdom Bank of England Job Description

We are the UK's central bank - and we are a bank like no other; known by our peers for our world-leading thinking on policy and strategy.

Our mission is to promote the good of the people of the UK by maintaining monetary and financial stability. We seek to keep prices stable and people's money safe. We know our work matters to people, to families, up and down the UK. We are driven by curiosity and the desire to do important, challenging work.

It takes a great team to run the Bank of England. We rely on each other to play our part. We benefit from a collaborative culture and long-established flexible ways of working, supporting our colleagues balance their work and personal lives. We strive to be a place where people feel they belong and have equal access to opportunities, because different perspectives help us make the best decisions for the public.

The User-Centred Service Design Team

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 experienced Service Designer to join the User-Centred Service Design team at the Bank of England. You will help teams understand how services work, identify opportunities for improvement, and design solutions that balance user needs, organisational objectives and operational realities. You will work with a good degree of independence across projects and services, using evidence from a range of sources to develop clear recommendations, service improvements and actionable outputs.

The role is expected to cover three primary responsibilities:

1. Service design delivery

You will plan and deliver service design activities across the lifecycle of a project or service. You will select, apply and adapt appropriate service design methods to understand problems, explore opportunities and develop practical, evidence-based recommendations. This may include journey mapping, service blueprinting, stakeholder engagement, workshop facilitation, co-design, insight synthesis, prototyping and concept testing.

You will work with multidisciplinary teams to improve end-to-end services, considering users, teams, processes, policies and technology, and helping ensure solutions are effective, usable and adoptable.

2. Stakeholder engagement and influence

You will work with stakeholders across different disciplines and levels of the organisation to build shared understanding, identify needs and priorities, and influence informed decision-making through evidence, facilitation and collaboration.

You will communicate complex ideas clearly, present findings and recommendations to a range of audiences, and use evidence, facilitation and collaboration to influence outcomes and improve services.

3. Practice contribution

You will contribute to the continued growth of service design within the Bank by sharing knowledge, supporting less experienced colleagues informally, and helping improve ways of working.

You will contribute to service design standards, tools, templates and communities of practice, helping to strengthen consistency and quality across the discipline while working within the direction set by more senior practitioners.

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

• Professional experience as a Service Designer
• Experience applying service design methods across projects, products or services
• Ability to plan and deliver service design activities with minimal supervision, escalating where appropriate
• Experience working with stakeholders to understand needs, challenges and opportunities
• Ability to analyse and synthesise insights from multiple sources and translate them into actionable recommendations
• Experience working within multidisciplinary teams

Essential requirements

• Experience designing or improving end-to-end services and user journeys
• Strong capability in service design methods such as journey mapping, service blueprinting, stakeholder mapping, co-design, workshop facilitation, insight synthesis, prototyping and concept testing.
• Understanding of user-centred and evidence-led approaches and how to apply them in practice
• Ability to understand how users, teams, processes, policies and technology interact within a service
• Strong critical thinking, analytical and problem-solving skills
• Experience facilitating workshops and collaborative activities
• Ability to communicate insights, recommendations and design rationale clearly to different audiences
• Proven ability to build effective relationships and work constructively with stakeholders
• Experience balancing user needs, organisational objectives and operational realities when developing clear, actionabl