Lead AI Service Designer and User Researcher

Job summary

The Integrated Corporate Services (ICS) is a shared corporate service. It provides corporate services (HR, Finance, Digital, Commercial, Security and Estates) across the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) and the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology (DSIT).

Our team of over 400 professionals will be leading the way in how these functions will be delivered in the future. Our ambition is to be the leading provider of integrated corporate services for government and set the standard for quality, efficiency, and innovation in our field.

We offer great working benefits including a world-class pension, flexible working options and a career where your learning and development is taken seriously. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.

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Job description

The DESNZ Change & Transformation Directorate is shaping what it means to be a truly consumer-focused department, reimagining our operating model, organisational capabilities, systems, processes and structures to meet both immediate and long-term goals. A key part of that transformation is harnessing the power of AI. The AI Product Development Team is a new, discovery-led product team within the Change & Transformation Directorate. We take the department's highest-value AI ideas and shape them into well-understood problems and well-designed solutions, then direct the specialist capacity needed to build them.

Person specification

• Run product discovery on everything the team takes on, understanding the problem and the users before the team commits to a solution: who the users are, what they are actually trying to do, and what is getting in the way.
• Turn ideas into structured, testable use cases with clear problem statements, barriers and data requirements.
• Map the end-to-end journeys and design the service around them, covering the as-is and to-be business process as well as the user journey.
• Elicit requirements from users and business owners, and test ideas before the team decides what or whether to build, using prototypes, journey walkthroughs and research with real users.
• Set the accessibility, inclusion and user-need standards the team designs to.
• Commission and quality-assure any additional design or research capacity.
• Act as the voice of the user in the team's investment and prioritisation advice to the DESNZ Data & AI Committee, and in handover to the business owners who adopt what we build.

Essential Criteria

• Significant experience of user-centred design in a large, complex organisation, spanning both user research and service design.
• Experience of designing and delivering inclusive research with a range of users and across different methods, and the judgement to choose the right method for the question being asked.
• Experience of mapping and designing end-to-end journeys, covering business process as well as user journey, and of balancing user needs against business, operational and technical constraints.
• Experience of turning ambiguous ideas into structured, testable problem statements, requirements and measures of success.
• Able to create actionable, evidence-based insight and communicate it clearly and confidently to senior stakeholders.
• Able to navigate a complex stakeholder landscape and gain support for research plans, findings and ways of working.
• Experience of working in a multidisciplinary team, and of commissioning or quality-assuring design and research delivered by others.
• A demonstrable commitment to accessible, inclusive and equitable design.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience of discovery on AI or data-enabled products, including recognising where AI is not the right answer.
• Familiarity with the Government Service Standard and experience of government service assessments.
• Experience of working with linked administrative or personal data and the information governance constraints that come with it.
• Experience of working in an agile environment with complexity, uncertainty and organisational constraints.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Evidence-based design (Practitioner)
• User Research Methods (Practitioner)
• Describe a piece of discovery you led. Set out how you chose your research methods for the problem, how you analysed and synthesised what you found, and how that evidence changed the design or the decision about what to build.

We only ask for evidence of these technical skills on your application form:

• Describe a piece of discovery you led. Set out how you chose your research methods for the problem, how you analysed and synthesised what you found, and how that evidence changed the design or the decision about what to build.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,900, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero contributes £16,483 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate u