Lead Service Designer

Lead Service Designer

Pay up to £75,026 - £80,267 plus 28.97% employer pension contributions, hybrid working, flexible hours, and great work life balance.

DWP Digital and Transformation Group offers rewarding careers for people who want to use their skills to make a meaningful difference to society. As part of the UK’s largest government department, we support millions of people every day through essential products services and payments.

We are looking for a confident, inquisitive and collaborative Lead Service Designer to help shape the future of these services.

You will work across Working Age Services and the wider department to identify and understand complex problems, collaborate with multidisciplinary teams and test and refine solutions that improve outcomes for citizens.

You’ll need strong facilitation skills to bring teams and stakeholders together, create shared understanding and drive innovation through user-centred design and emerging technologies.

We’ve got a supportive user-centred design community committed to creating accessible services that meet the needs of all users. As a Lead Service Designer, you will also play an important leadership role, mentoring others and helping to develop service design capability across the organisation.

• Significant experience designing and delivering end-to-end services that address complex user, business and organisational challenges.
• Strong service design expertise, with the ability to use evidence and insight to shape services that achieve user and organisational outcomes.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with experience influencing senior leaders and championing user-centred design.
• Experience establishing and maintaining collaborative ways of working that enable multidisciplinary teams to deliver effective service design outcomes.
• Experience working with policy and strategy teams is also highly desirable, as a key aspect of the role will involve helping to shape our approach to emerging policy areas.

As a Lead Service Designer, you will help shape the future of DWP’s Working Age Services by bringing together user needs, policy and business priorities to design services that deliver better outcomes.

Working Age Services develops and operates products and services that support millions of people. This includes the Work Hub—a suite of digital tools that helps people understand their skills, explore careers, identify development opportunities, access training and move into work. We also deliver Universal Credit and other benefit payment systems, supporting more than 8 million people and forming part of the UK’s national critical infrastructure.

A champion of user-centred design, you’ll work closely with Product Managers, policy colleagues and multidisciplinary teams, using evidence, insight and research to shape services, influence strategic decisions and improve end-to-end user experiences.

You’ll join us in one of our brilliant digital hubs in Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester, whichever is most convenient for you.

We work a hybrid model—you’ll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face-to-face in a hub.

We offer competitive pay from £75,026 - £80,267.

You’ll get a civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%, up to £23,253 per year.

A generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time. You can also take up to 3 extra days off a month on flexitime, plus all usual public holidays.

• Flexible working including flexible hours and flex-friendly policies
• Time off volunteering and charitable giving
• Bring your authentic self to work with 'I Can Be Me in DWP'
• Discounts and savings on shopping, fun days out and more
• Interest-free loans to buy a bike or a season ticket, making it easier to get to work and make a difference
• Sports and social activities
• Professional development, coaching, mentoring and career progression opportunities

• DWP has been recognised as 2024 Diversity Employer of the Year at the Computing Women in Tech Excellence awards
• Diverse and Inclusive Leadership at Digital Leaders Awards 2024
• Commended as Best Place to Work in Digital category in the Computing Digital Technology Leaders awards 2025
• Recognised as one of the Best Public Sector Employers at 2025 Women In Tech Employer Awards

We know your time is valuable so our application and selection process is just two stages: