Senior Design Lead
Location - Croydon
Salary - London pay location - £77,900 -£85,690
Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
As a Senior Design Lead, you'll be at the heart of strategic transformation—collaborating across operations, strategy, policy, and IT to turn big ideas into practical, impactful designs. You'll translate strategic goals into clear business architecture, becoming a trusted voice in delivery teams and a key driver of meaningful change. Working alongside experts in business analysis, service design, data, and technology, you will help shape solutions that deliver real results.
If successful, you will initially be assigned to one of our major transformation programmes or services or products. However, over time you may be deployed across a range of transformation or service or capability development activities in support of the Department's priorities.
Key responsibilities:
* Establishing and leading a cross functional design team made up of civil servants, consultants and/or contractors whose purpose will be to deliver design outcomes to the relevant programme or service.
* Developing and maintaining a sequenced design plan to ensure all design effort across the domain is effectively managed, prioritised with clear accountability to the appropriate delivery vehicles whether it be for programmes, projects or services.
* Acting as a mentor and coach to members of the profession, or wider design team as appropriate.
* Applying design to various scenarios across programme and services.
* Supporting colleagues in identifying optimal courses of action, potential impacts and areas of investment identified through business architecture.
* Leading on the development of design workstreams and artefacts that effectively use business architecture and design collateral to translate business strategy into business/solution designs. Integration with other design disciplines to provide a holistic view.
* Shaping and prioritising design activities in the delivery space.
* Identifying pain points in achieving business value, developing designs to address.
Essential criteria:
* Bridges business and technology perspectives, fostering inclusive collaboration to align strategic objectives with practical, people-centred solutions.
* Leads complex transformation programmes, applying structured, transparent approaches that balance risk, investment, and stakeholder engagement ensuring diverse voices are considered in decision-making.
* Distils complexity into clarity, identifying patterns and interdependencies to shape evidence-based recommendations that influence executive strategy.
* Communicates with impact across senior audiences, building alignment, navigating competing priorities, and promoting inclusive, consensus-driven outcomes.
* Champions talent development, coaching future leaders, embedding inclusive practices, and cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and shared ownership in business architecture.
Qualifications:
Whilst design leads need to have the capability to work across design professions to deliver rounded design outcomes, you will have a background in either Business Architecture, Business Analysis or Service Design. As such the post holder must hold or be actively working towards obtaining either :
* Certified Business Architect (CBA) qualification by the Business Architecture Guild, or
* BCS International Diploma in Business Analysis or other equivalent qualification.
This can be obtained whilst the candidate is in post.