Lead Interaction Designer
Application Deadline: 20 March 2026
Department: Strategy & Design
Employment Type: Permanent
Location: Any UK Office Hub (Bristol / London / Manchester / Swansea)
Compensation: £65,000 - £75,000 / year
Description
Lead Interaction Designers are senior specialists and expert practitioners across various design disciplines, including UX Design, Interaction Design, and Product Design. The role involves delivering positive outcomes in the public sector through a design-led approach and technology-enabled critical services. A key part of the role is coaching and mentoring other designers within the Interaction and Service Design Practice at Made Tech.
Key Responsibilities
* Hands-on Design: assure the successful design and delivery of public services through technology.
* Subject Matter Expert: act as a subject matter expert, facilitate the design process, communicate design decisions to teams, and set expectations with stakeholders.
* Community Leadership: actively participate in the Service and Interaction Design community, leading on, developing, and sharing good practice.
* Team Support: actively support retention, hiring, and team quality, including mentoring and coaching.
* Practice Development: create a shared understanding of problems, use storytelling to uncover the 'why,' and ensure public services are simple to explain, understand, and use.
* Commercial Support: build client relationships, earn trust, and support the commercial team by contributing to bids relating to User-Centred Design (UCD).
Practice
* Create a shared understanding of problems to solve and ideas to test
* Make things real through storytelling and uncovering the 'why'
* Caring about design enough to make sure everyone can use public services
* Make use of the Made Tech playbooks where they exist and support their development
* Make public services simple to explain, understand, and use by removing unnecessary complexity and keeping designs focused on creating positive outcomes for people and society.
Leading teams
* Assure the quality of design delivery across multiple teams.
* Raise and manage delivery risks to prevent them becoming issues using clear mitigation and management plans
* Introduce good habits for sharing and improving design work into teams.
Community
* Line management of designers
* Support the hiring and onboarding of designers (contract and permanent)
* Help define Made Tech design principles through delivering effective public services
* Represent and advocate for user-centred design publicly and internally
Sales
* Build relationships with clients, earning their trust and understanding their needs
* Support the sales team to win new work by contributing and reviewing bids relating to UCD
* Contribute to marketing materials (blogs, case studies, talks).
Key Measures
* Case studies of how to design and deliver good public services and outcomes
* Contributing to the growth and happiness of the UCD community at Made Tech
* Deliver your project objectives on time and to the expected standard
* Display the Made Tech values and behaviours reflected in feedback from colleagues and clients
* Ensure your team members (direct reports and account team members) feel fully supported and engaged - provision of regular 1:1s, an effective cascade of information and progression of development plans.
Behaviours
* Client Focus - a need to put the most compelling offer possible in front of the client
* Drive to Deliver - able to take ownership of the response, pushing it through the business inside the timeframes that we have been given.
* Learning and Mentoring - an appetite to grow fast and learn while passing on your own experience to your teams and colleagues
* One team - contributing to the ongoing improvement of the function at Made Tech, sharing experiences and successes as well as learning points.
Skills, Knowledge & Expertise
* Expert practitioners: able to develop new and novel approaches to complex design challenges and expert in leading design tools (e.g., Figma, GOV.UK prototyping kit).
* Influencers and mentors: able to coach and mentor others, define interaction and service design standards, and influence the organisation and clients on the contribution of the practice.
* Proactive and accountable: work is often self-initiated, they are fully responsible for their outcomes, and they are comfortable owning a problem through to resolution.
* Collaborative: define what 'good' design looks like on an engagement and support client collaboration to consistently ensure users' needs are met.
Job Benefits
We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We're also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.
Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:
30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays
Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
Paid counseling - we offer paid counseling as well as financial and legal advice
If successful, you will be required to undertake an SC clearance