User-Centered Design Practitioner; System, Service, Product

User-Centered Design Practitioner (System, Service, Product) Satellite Applications Catapult

Employment Type

Full time

Location Hybrid
· Didcot, UK Harwell, Didcot, Oxfordshire (onsite 2 days per week)

Seniority Mid-level

• Closing:5:00pm, 9th Jan 2026 GMT

• Work from home option
• Life Insurance
• Wellness programs
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave
• Sabbatical Opportunities
• Salary sacrifice
• Team social events
• Extracurricular clubs
• Cycle to work scheme

The Role

We’re hiring a designer who creates clarity rather than waiting for it. You will join the User-Centred Design team at the Satellite Applications Catapult, supporting complex, early-stage work where the challenge is often shaping the right problem, convening stakeholders, understanding needs, and turning uncertainty into clear opportunities.

This role will suit a designer with range. We are not looking for a narrow specialist. You will use whichever design tools are most useful in the moment: framing and planning discovery, facilitating expert discussion, mapping systems and services, making lightweight prototypes or wireframes to test an idea, and translating learnings into clear recommendations.

You will also be outward facing. We work across the space sector with a wide mix of organisations, from small start-ups to large multinationals, alongside public sector and academic partners. Building credibility quickly, maintaining relationships, and connecting the right people is a meaningful part of how we succeed in our work.

This is not a senior post, but it is not a first job either. You should be able to take ownership of work with light direction from Senior staff, work confidently with specialists, and keep momentum without needing constant oversight.

Create clarity in ambiguity: Get to the real problem quickly, define what “good” looks like, and work collaboratively to create a plan of action.

Move teams from discussion to decision: Design and run workshops and working sessions that end with clear choices, priorities, and next steps.

Make ideas tangible to unblock progress: Produce sketches, journeys, service blueprints, flows, simple prototypes, and quick experiments to test assumptions early.

Run discovery that leads to action: Plan and carry out user and stakeholder research, synthesise findings, and translate learning into implications teams can use.

Work across disciplines without being the expert: Facilitate between specialist groups, ensuring user needs, operational realities, and delivery constraints are represented.

Be curious and ask the fundamental “stupid” questions early: Challenge assumptions, surface what people are avoiding or taking for granted, and use simple questions to reveal gaps, risks, and the fundamentals teams need to agree on.

Support delivery through practical design: Help teams navigate scope, trade-offs, acceptance criteria, and what needs to be true for a solution to work in practice.

Strengthen the UCD team’s practice: Improve templates, ways of working, and quality bars, and contribute to how we collaborate across the Catapult.

You have experience in a design role and can take ownership of meaningful work without heavy training or constant direction.

You are good at turning complexity into structure, and structure into decisions.

You take initiative, follow through, and make progress visible.

You work well with very different people skills and backgrounds and are effective in the middle, translating and connecting as needed.

You are commercially aware and understand motivations, constraints, and how decisions get made.

You are comfortable engaging externally and can build credibility and relationships with partners.

You enjoy in-person collaboration and use it to build trust and create momentum.

You can be effective without being the subject matter expert. You ask strong questions, learn fast, and bring a user and outcomes lens.

We’re looking for evidence of most of the following:

Design experience: You have worked in service design, product design, UX, design research, design strategy,…