Senior Service Designer - 24 Month FTC (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds and London)

Genomics England is a global leader in enabling genomic medicine and research, focused on creating a world where everyone benefits from genomic healthcare. Building on the 100,000 Genomes Project, we support the NHS’s world-first national whole genome sequencing service and run the growing National Genomic Research Library, alongside delivering numerous major genomics initiatives. By connecting research and clinical care at national scale, we enable immediate healthcare benefits and advances for the future.

Our mission is to provide the evidence and digital systems so that by 2035 genomics could play a role in up to half of all healthcare interactions, whilst securing the UK’s position as the best place to discover, prove and benefit from genomic innovations.

We are accelerating our impact and working with patients, doctors, scientists, government and industry to improve genomic testing, and help researchers access the health data and technology they need to make new medical discoveries and create more effective, targeted medicines for everybody.

Behind the Healthcare and Research outcomes, Genomics England delivers through designing, developing and operating complex healthcare software systems.

We're on the cusp of big changes with the real prospect of genomics becoming the fabric of everyday healthcare through the lifetime – from birth to old age.

We are seeking a Senior Service Designer to join Genomics England based on a 24 month fixed term contract, to play a pivotal role in shaping how our services are experienced and delivered.  

In this role you will apply human-centred and systems-thinking approaches, connecting user needs, operational realities and service goals, working across delivery teams to shape and improve the Healthcare Genomics Service. You will map the people, processes, data, tools and dependencies involved, collaborating with others to provide actionable insights and identify and act on opportunities for service improvement. This could include work such as discovery and prototyping of new service opportunities, optimising the user experience for our bioinformatician, clinical scientist, or internal users, and improving capabilities, ensuring user and business needs are both well-served.

The role involves:

• Leading the creation of service journeys in collaboration with programme leads, service owners, designers, user researchers and other cross-functional partners. 
• Facilitating decision making and co-creation across multiple teams through appropriate methods.
• Bringing a human centred approach to solving problems, translating user needs and goals into human centred solutions, ensuring the experience is joined up across the teams delivering it.
• Organising your own work cadence with the Service Owner and stakeholders, engaging regularly to understand challenges, capture needs, and stay aligned.
• Visualising and communicating complex problem spaces to align the cross functional team and help understand them to understand and create solutions effectively.

Everyday responsibilities include: 

• Solve medium-to-high complexity service design challenges with a principled, human-centred approach. 
• Translate insights, user stories, and requirements into design solutions, ensuring user needs are met across the service, including back stages. 
• Deliver clear design outputs, such as user journeys, service maps, design briefs, and EPICs to enable decision-making and implementation. 
• Scope work effectively and plan design activities using an iterative, agile approach. 
• Collaborate efficiently with product and service delivery teams to ensure connected, implementable service experiences across key touchpoints. 
• Advocate for users, influencing teams to build equitable, inclusive services that meet user needs effectively. 
• Participate in design research and testing, incorporating learnings to continuously improve services and inform team plans and roadmaps. 

Skills and experience for success:

• Proven expertise in service design, with hands-on experience using tools such as service blueprints, journey maps, service patterns, and process mapping, and a strong portfolio demonstrating human-centred design in complex services.
• Skilled at leading cross-functional work, bringing together colleagues across disciplines, including scientists, technical specialists, and delivery teams to collaborate effectively and deliver shared outcomes. 
• Strong strategic and systems thinking, able to tackle complex service challenges across front-end, back-end, and behind the scenes processes, while navigating governance, policy, and regulatory constraints. 
• Comfortable working with complex data flows, technical disciplines, and ambiguous problems, translating insights into actionable design solutions that support decision-making. 
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills, with the ability to visualise and articulate complex problems, facilitate co-creation, and lead projects with a human-centred approach. 
• Advanced storytelling skills, with the ability to clearly communicate complex problems, decisions, and outcomes to diverse audiences, influencing understanding and alignment across multidisciplinary and senior teams.

Desirable Skills:

• Comfortable and effective when working with ambiguity and able to support others to navigate uncertainty and find focus to deliver value.
• Experienced in creating patterns and defining boundaries for other areas to adopt.
• Strong influence and experience building and navigating relationships to ensure collaboration and adoption of best practice in other areas of the organisation.
• Strong understanding of data, technology infrastructure and integration across systems with experience of working collaboratively with technical colleagues.
• Experienced balancing tactical delivery with creating overarching and long-term strategy to ensure scalability and sustainability of solutions.
• Experience working under Government Digital Service Standard.  
• Experience working confidently within highly regulated, risk-sensitive contexts.
• Awareness and sensitivity to ethical, compliance, and regulatory considerations when designing and delivering services with sensitive data. 

Salary from: £68,500

Closing date for applications - Friday 6th November at midnight.

As part of the application process, we require candidates to provide a cover letter and also their portfolio of work showcasing their skills & experience.

Being an integral part of such a meaningful mission is extremely rewarding in itself, but in order to support our people, we’re continually improving our benefits package. We pride ourselves on investing in our people and supporting them to achieve their career goals, as well as offering a benefits package including:

• Generous Leave: 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, additional leave for long service, and the option to apply for up to 30 days of remote working abroad annually (approval required).
• Family-Friendly: Blended working arrangements, flexible working, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave benefits.
• Pension & Financial: Defined contribution pension (Genomics England double-matches up to 10%, however you can contribute more if you wish), Life Assurance (3x salary), an Electric Vehicle salary sacrifice scheme and a Give As You Earn scheme.
• Learning & Development: Individual learning budgets, support for training and certifications, and reimbursement for one annual professional subscription (approval required).
• Recognition & Rewards: Employee recognition programme and referral scheme.
• Health & Wellbeing: Subsidised gym membership, a free Headspace account, and access to an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu jabs.

Equal opportunities and our commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace

Genomics England is actively committed to providing and supporting an inclusive environment that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion best practice both within our community and in any other area where we have influence. We are proud of our diverse community where everyone can come to work and feel welcomed and treated with respect regardless of any disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, or social background.

Genomics England’s policies of non-discrimination and equity and will be applied fairly to all people, regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, being pregnant or recently becoming a parent, race, religion or beliefs, sex or sexual orientation, length of service, whether full or part-time or employed under a permanent or a fixed-term contract or any other relevant factor.

Genomics England does not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, victimisation or bullying at work. Such behaviour undermines our mission and core values and diminishes the dignity, respect and integrity of all parties. Our People policies outline our commitment to inclusivity.

We aim to remove barriers in our recruitment processes and to be flexible with our interview processes. Should you require any adjustments that may help you to fully participate in the recruitment process, we encourage you to discuss this with us.

Culture

We have four key behaviours that represent what we would like Genomics England to feel like and the culture we want to encourage, in order for us to achieve our mission. These behaviours help us all work well together, deliver on our outcomes, celebrate our successes and share feedback with each other. You can read about these and other aspects of our culture here Culture | Genomics England

Blended working model

Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility that hybrid working can bring. We expect most people to come into the office a minimum of 2 times each month. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that people will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require full time on site attendance e.g., lab teams, reception team.

Our teams and squads have, and will continue to reflect on what works best for them to work together successfully and have the freedom to design working patterns to suit, beyond the minimum. Our office locations are: Canary Wharf, Cambridge and Leeds.

Onboarding background checks

As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates are subject to a Standard Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. We therefore require applicants to disclose any previous offences at point of application, as some unspent convictions may mean we are unable to proceed with your application due to the nature of our work in healthcare.