Senior Service Designer

Are you a dedicated person who is passionate about making a difference?

Would you like to work for the Ministry of Defence? 

Defence Business Services (DBS) is one of the largest shared service organisations in Europe that provides a wide range of corporate services, to over 1.2 million end users, including serving and past military and families, as well as MoD civil servants and industry. DBS delivers large scale administration and smaller specialist services to enable the wider MOD to focus on its core aims, maintaining the UK’s Defence and Security. Services include Human Resources, Pay, Veterans, Finance and Procurement.

• Our Vision – To support UK defence customers with outstanding service every time.
• Our Mission – Together we will proudly support Defence, continuously improving and delivering flexible, timely, sustainable and value for money services that underpin the whole force and enhance operational capability.

DBS is committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues. We are building an inclusive culture and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society.

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us through opportunities to develop your skills and experience. We also offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career accessible to you and offer a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%. Where your role permits, we support a blended working approach alternatively known as hybrid working.

DBS has recently undertaken a review of its operational locations in the North West, and have consolidated all activities in Norcross, Blackpool. A further move, to the new Government Hub at Talbot Gateway in Blackpool, is scheduled to take place in 2026.

Come and join the DBS community today!

This role is to design end-to-end journey of services across Defence Business Services.  Services include public facing transactions on www.gov.uk such as ‘Apply for a deceased person’s military record’. You will also design products and content across digital and off-line channels and internal digital forms and products provided to all staff in the Ministry of Defence.

The post-holder will work collaboratively with service team members including development, analytics and user research as well as working closely with internal and external stakeholders and will create, or change, transactions, products and content to meet user needs and organisation outcomes.

As a Service Designer you will:

•    Support the design and implementation of services, strategies and policies to advocate for user needs whilst ensuring business requirements are being met.
•    Advocate for inclusive, collaborative and user centred service design practices.
•    Advise on the tools and methods for service design.
•    Work within cross-functional teams and collaborate with stakeholders, and partners to identify user needs and design solutions that meet those needs.
•    Champion design for users for whom assisted digital and/or accessibility technologies are required to access a service.
•    Prototype and validate proposed designs using a variety of prototyping tools (including strong prototyping in code including HTML, CSS & JavaScript)
•    Have responsibility for service design across complex services, ensuring services solve the whole problem for users and meet both user needs and policy intent.
•    Identity and understand constraints, communicate these and work within them (including challenging the validity of constraints where appropriate whilst ensuring standards are being met).
•    Help identify high level needs and epics to influence the product roadmap and how the backlog is prioritised.
•    Map the experience of users and highlight areas where it can be improved.
•    Explore ways of simplifying complex end-to-end processes for digital and non-digital journeys
•    Promote the value of service design across the organisation.

Essential experience required: 

•    Service design, with proven ability to develop evidence and context based design
•    Building positive relationships, engaging with, and influencing, stakeholders to deliver outcomes
•    Introducing positive change into working practices, teams or organisations
•    Strong understanding of the GOV.UK design system and prototyping kit with the ability to prototype in code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
•    Experience of working to the government service standard and/or GOV.UK standards and working practices
•    Excellent planning and organisational skills and the ability to prioritise to meet deadlines and cope with fluctuations in workload
•    Designing accessible, usable services that are based on meeting user needs, across multiple products and channels
•    Helping teams understand the wider context of a design project or product
•    Working in an agile, multi-disciplinary and collaborative environment

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership
• Communicating and Influencing

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Evidence and context-based design Level – Senior service designer
• Prototyping Level – Senior service designer
• User focus Level – Senior service designer
• Community collaboration Level – Senior service designer