Strategic Space Planner

Overview

Join to apply for the Strategic Space Planner role at Zaha Hadid Architects.

Location: London, Clerkenwell

Contract: 1 year, Fixed Term Contract

Hours: 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday.

Responsibilities

• Using computational tools and analytic methods to assess the performance of proposed designs under aspects such as communication potential, use efficiency and user comfort, and presenting the outcome to an internal audience to inform layouts, and to clients to improve brief development and decision making
• Supporting client needs assessments and assisting with early brief development, often through layouts, diagrams, and comparative studies.
• Carrying out strategic space planning and floorplate analysis—mostly for workplace but occasionally for cultural, civic, healthcare, or mixed-use projects.
• Helping prepare and maintain benchmarking content, such as space standards, ratios, furniture layouts, and best-practice examples.
• Creating, editing and operating digital tools used in our planning and analysis work.
• Producing clear, tidy outputs including CAD drawings, spreadsheets, diagrams, and internal presentations.
• Contributing to the development of our workplace consultancy tools and services, in collaboration with our design teams.

Skills & Qualifications

• Interested in space planning, client needs analysis, and the strategic side of design.
• Proficient in 2D layout drawing, with some experience using Grasshopper and Rhino.
• Organised, reliable, and detail-oriented.
• Comfortable working across multiple projects—sometimes at speed.
• Open to doing a mix of tasks, from layout studies and data wrangling to content formatting and team coordination.
• Curious and collaborative—interested in learning, sharing ideas, and working alongside architects, interior designers, coders, and external consultants.
• Familiarity with coding, data, or AI is helpful but not essential—we’re happy to support learning in those areas.

What You’ll Gain

• Exposure to a broad range of projects, clients, and typologies—often at early design stages.
• Experience working in a support team that partners with different design teams across the office.
• A better understanding of how strategic decisions shape design—from early briefing to detailed planning.
• The opportunity to build your skills in planning, analysis, communication, and generative tools in a supportive environment.

Qualifications

• Qualified to a Master\’s degree (or equivalent international qualification) with relevant experience.
• Confident in Software skills such as 3D, 2D, CAD, Grasshopper, Revit and Coding.

About us Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) redefined architecture for the 21st century with a repertoire of projects that have captured imaginations across the globe. Creating buildings uniquely tailored to the communities they serve, ZHA has been awarded the highest honours from professional and academic institutions worldwide. Founded by Zaha Hadid in 1979, ZHA is one of the world’s most consistently inventive architectural studios—and has been for four decades. These decades of pioneering research are inscribed within our architecture to become more spatially inventive, more structurally efficient, more technologically advanced, and more environmentally considerate with every new design. Combining innovative architectural solutions with ecologically sound materials and sustainable construction practices, we do not look at the disparate parts, but work to understand them as a whole to meet the aspirations of each new generation. As an employee-owned business, we reinvest all profits back into our people and our company; continually enhancing our multidisciplinary research to address the challenges impacting communities around the world.