Head of Service Design

Salary: £85,000 per annum, plus company benefits

Location: Remote – United Kingdom

Contract: Full Time

Shifts: 37.5 hours per week, Monday – Friday, 9am until 5:30pm with 1 hours unpaid lunch break

Williams Lea seeks a Head of Service Design to join our team!

Purpose of role

The Head of Service Design is a senior, hands‑on design leader who establishes and leads Williams Lea’s design function, spanning UI/UX, service design, and product research under a single reporting line.

Integrated human‑plus‑AI service delivery

Technology amplifying specialist human services rather than replacing them. Designing this integrated experience, and keeping it coherent as capabilities fold the new Williams Lea core technology platforms over the next 12–18 months, is the strategic heart of the role.

The postholder contributes directly to design work alongside leading a small, high‑quality function. Authority over all over‑arching standards including design systems, interaction conventions, accessibility & research methodology, sits with this role. On domain‑specific design, decision‑making is collaborative with product managers.

Key responsibilities

Design system and cross‑cutting standards

• Establish, own, and evolve the Williams Lea design system including tokens, components, interaction patterns as the authoritative reference for the Williams Lea core platform and standalone technology products.
• Set and uphold cross‑cutting standards on interaction conventions, accessibility (relevant to regulated‑industry clients), and research methodology.
• Partner with the relevant product managers on domain‑specific design decisions. The PM owns the domain roadmap; the design function is a strong, often‑decisive voice.
• Provide design leadership across domain teams through quality of contribution, clarity of thinking, and partnership with product managers.
• Provide design leadership, coaching, and quality assurance to designers working within each domain.

Service design – integrated human and AI experience

• Lead the design of the integrated human‑plus‑AI service experience that defines the Williams Lea proposition.
• Map end‑to‑end client journeys that span the platform and specialist human work, identifying the moments where AI‑to‑human (and human‑to‑AI) hand‑off is critical to experience and outcome.
• Design the interfaces for all user groups and personas including, client users, and Williams Lea operations. Partner with service‑line leadership to ensure depth of understanding across all use cases.

Product research as a practice

• Establish and scale product research across the four product domains.
• Build research methodology and cadence that PMs cite as a material input to their decisions.
• Serve as a standing member of the Platform Council, representing service and product design.
• Ensure that the design of the platform is made in collaboration with product, engineering and end‑users.

Build and lead the team

• Hire, develop, and retain a small, high‑quality design function of approximately 4–6 people at 12 months, across UI/UX, service design, and product research.
• Set the hiring and quality bar through personal contribution to design work as well as through recruitment.
• Contribute directly to design work alongside leading the function, including involvement in critical projects, design reviews, and the design system.

Key experience and competencies

• 10–12 years in product and service design, with at least 3–4 years of team‑building and leadership experience.
• Proven experience leading a design team of 4–6 designers while continuing to contribute directly to design work.
• Strong in at least two of UI/UX, service design, and product research, with credible breadth across all three sufficient to lead the function.
• Credible, demonstrable experience in service design spanning digital products and human service delivery.
• Experience designing for enterprise B2B contexts, ideally in regulated industries.
• Experience establishing or owning a design system that serves multiple products or business units.
• Strong grounding in user‑centred design, service design methods, and design thinking.
• Strong knowledge of accessibility (WCAG) and inclusive design practices, particularly as they apply to regulated‑industry clients.
• Excellent stakeholder communication, explains design decisions in terms that product managers, engineers, and executives each understand. Writes clearly and presents credibly in front of client‑level audiences.
• Collaborative working style, partners effectively with product managers, engineering, and operations leadership.
• Experience designing AI‑or automation‑enabled products, including human–AI interaction patterns, conversational or generative interfaces, or agentic workflows. A material plus given the AiVA context.
• Understanding of front‑end development principles (HTML, CSS) sufficient to enable close collaboration with engineers.

Rewards and benefits

• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays (pro‑rata for part‑time or fixed‑term roles)
• Salary sacrifice schemes, retail vouchers – including our TechScheme which can be used on a range of gadgets such as Smart TV’s, laptops and computers or household appliances.
• Life Assurance
• Private Medical Insurance
• Health Assessments
• Discounted gym memberships
• Referral Scheme

Equality and diversity

The Company values the differences that a diverse workforce brings to the organisation and will not discriminate because of age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins), religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation (each of these being a “protected characteristic” in discrimination law). It will not discriminate because of any other irrelevant factor and will build a culture that values openness, fairness and transparency.

If you have a disability and would prefer to apply in a different format or would like to make a reasonable adjustment to enable you to make an interview please contact us at careersatWL@williamslea.com (we do not accept applications to this email address).

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