Lead Service Designer in Exeter

We’re looking for a Lead Service Designer to help us make a difference to our planet. This job may be suitable for hybrid working, which is where an employee works part of the week in the office and part of the week from home. This is a voluntary, non-contractual arrangement and the location advertised will be your contractual place of work.

Our opportunity is full time, 37 hours per week, but we would also consider applicants wishing to work a minimum of 30 hours per week and we will also try our best to consider those intending to work a jobshare. Our people are at the heart of what we do and we’ll do our best to agree a working pattern that works for everyone.

World changing work

From science to technology, from meteorology to management, and from planning to communication, our expertise helps us stand out as the authority on weather accuracy and climate prediction. We help individuals, industries and government to make better decisions to stay safe and thrive. This is the Met Office. This is who we are.

Your world of expertise

As a Lead Service Designer, you’ll play a pivotal role in transforming how the Met Office designs and delivers services, ensuring user needs are at the heart of every decision. Working within a multidisciplinary team alongside a Service Owner, you’ll lead our transition from a complex product portfolio to best-in-class end-to-end services. You will influence senior stakeholders and help embed a user-centred, evidence-based culture that delivers meaningful outcomes for government, industry and the public.

• Lead the transition, design and continuous improvement of complex service lines, ensuring services are user-centred, evidence-based and aligned to our customer-centric Met Office strategy.
• Provide strategic direction, quality assurance and leadership across multidisciplinary teams, embedding best practice service design approaches and standards.
• Influence and challenge senior stakeholders, using user insight and evidence to guide decision-making and ensure services meet genuine user needs.
• Develop service strategies, service blueprints, user journeys and other service design artefacts that shape the delivery of effective end-to-end services.
• Champion and grow user-centred design across the organisation by mentoring colleagues, improving service design capability, and promoting inclusive, accessible and sustainable design practices.

Our work is life-changing, often life-saving and always life-enhancing. The Met Office is Great Place to Work UK certified. We are also featured on their ‘Best Workplaces in Tech’ 2023, 2024 and 2025 lists, as well as their ’54 Best Workplaces for Women’ 2023 list.

Your total reward package will be up to £75,857 annually, which includes:

• An outstanding Civil Service pension, with an average employer contribution of 28.97%.
• Recruitment Retention Allowance (RRA) you will be paid £3,800 per annum as a market supplement to reflect the demand for your skills.
• Annual Leave starting at 27.5 days (plus Bank Holidays) rising to 32.5 days (plus Bank Holidays) after 5 years and option to buy or sell up to 5 days per year of annual leave.

Essential Criteria, skills and experience:

• Leading strategic design (Lead Criteria): You are an expert by nature in defining the purpose, impact and stages of transforming an organisation to deliver best-in-class services, aligned with a customer-centric corporate strategy.
• Design communication: You have experience communicating design strategy across organisational boundaries.
• Designing for everyone: You have experience championing and improving the practices of inclusive, accessible and environmentally sustainable design against measurable criteria.
• Designing together: You can demonstrate how you work better together by effectively planning and running sessions with senior leaders and stakeholders around the organisation.
• Evidence-based design: You live and breathe hypothesis-driven design and can guide organisations in how to use validated user evidence to establish and improve services.
• Iterative design: You have embedded the practice of iterative design and agile working and helped teams adapt quickly to changes in requirements, priorities, and user needs.

The panel may perform a preliminary sift of the lead criteria as indicated above.

Using AI in your application: We welcome applications that use AI tools for support in drafting or refining, as long as they accurately reflect your own skills and experience. All hiring decisions at the Met Office are made by people, not AI.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this opportunity further, please contact us at careers@metoffice.gov.uk.

If you’re considering applying and need support to do so, you can request adjustments either within your application or by contacting us.

Should you be offered an interview, please be aware there may be a selection exercise which could include a presentation, written test or a scenario-based activity.

You will need full Security Check Clearance for this role. Although it's not an essential requirement for this post, we may require Service Designers to have or be able to attain a successful Developed Vetting clearance in the future.

We understand that great minds don’t always think alike and as an equal opportunities employer we welcome applications from those with all protected characteristics. We recruit on merit, fairness, and open competition in line with the Civil Service Code.