Service Designer in Harwell

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: problem framing, facilitated 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.

Key Responsibilities – What You will Do

• 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 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.

What We are Looking For

• 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 people from very different disciplines and backgrounds.

You are comfortable engaging with engineers, technical specialists, researchers, and business stakeholders, translating between perspectives and helping teams make progress.

• 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 are comfortable discussing unfamiliar technical topics, you ask strong questions, learn fast, and bring a user and outcomes lens.

• Key Skills Required
• Design experience: You have worked for approximately 2 years in-role in service design, product design, UX, design research, design strategy, business innovation or similar, with real examples to share.
• Problem framing and sense-making: You can make a complex situation understandable: what matters, what is known, what is assumed, and what needs deciding.
• Discovery and research: You can plan and run interviews and stakeholder engagement, synthesise findings, and turn information into actionable insights.
• Facilitation: You can design and lead workshops with mixed groups and create focus, alignment, and decisive outcomes.
• Maker attitude: You like to ‘show by doing’ creating artefacts needed to help move work forward choosing the right level of fidelity for the task.
• Working with businesses: You have experience working on business innovation and an understanding of how to create a sustainable business case.
• Initiative and follow-through: You can drive work forward, manage your time, and maintain momentum across multiple stakeholders.
• External relationship building: You can engage people outside the organisation and maintain relationships that support our current and future work.
• Commercial awareness: You understand time, budget, delivery constraints, and organisational realities, and can design within them.
• Comfort with in-person collaboration: You are effective face-to-face and value being present to move work along.
• Nice to have
• Experience working in technical organisations or projects, including the ability to build credibility with engineers and technical specialists and translate complex concepts for mixed audiences in domains like data, engineering, infrastructure, digital products, or regulated environments.
• Experience supporting bids or proposals, shaping opportunities, or writing clear problem statements for new work.
• Familiarity with the space sector or adjacent industries such as telecoms, transport, energy, defence, climate, or agriculture.

About us & how we work

We strive to create a high trust, high performance and inclusive environment that enables team members to bring their whole selves to work.

This helps to create the foundations of an innovation culture.

Our shared values are critical to this

• We care- for our people, our partners, and our planet
• We connect- and engage with people and ideas
• We learn- and grow, as people and as an industry

Underpinning this is our belief in great teams.

Our combined efforts will always deliver outcomes beyond that of any individual, providing we are honest through debate, experiment and reflect, and create shared resolutions in support of our purpose.

Live these values, work to our principles, take ownership to deliver, and we are certain you will thrive with us.

This job description set outs the skills and experience we think are needed to be able to perform in this job.

We offer a hybrid policy which is designed around collaboration, one 'anchor' day per week working with your direct team and another flexible day per week to be spent collaborating or working with other colleagues.

Important notice for applicants: We use tools to detect plagiarism and the use of AI or chatbots for applicant answers.

If plagiarism, AI use (such as Chat GPT) or similar software are found to have been used in your application you will not be considered for this or future roles within the Satellite Applications Catapult.

At Satellite Applications Catapult, we're committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workforce.

We welcome candidates from all corners of the globe, but due to legal and logistical considerations, we want to be transparent about the potential visa-related challenges that could arise.

Our ability to offer sponsorship will depend on the level of interest for our roles and salary level.

If you need any additional support during the application process, please do reach out and connect. We also invite you to share feedback via Applied.

Please note that we offer study support (at our discretion) and on the job training will be provided.

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