Lead Service Designer

HM Land Registry's services form part of the critical national infrastructure, safeguarding land and property ownership valued at £8 trillion. This enables over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales.

It is an exciting time for HM Land Registry as we continue a major transformation programme. HMLR's ambition is to become the world’s leading land registry for speed, simplicity and an open approach to data.

We are looking for a Lead Service Designer who can help HMLR transform the way we serve our customers with Land Registration services that are customer focused, easy to use, accessible and work across multiple channels, devices, browsers and platforms.

As a Lead Service Designer, you will work on key strategic programmes and contribute across the full-service lifecycle of complex services. You will work as part of one or more agile, multidisciplinary teams designing new services or enhancing existing ones. You will be responsible for shaping seamless user experiences across both digital and offline channels, setting the direction for service design across a programme of work, ensuring joined up service thinking, consistency of experience and service design standards are met, and that our service design processes are being followed by all designers. You will lead and co-ordinate service design activity within your teams and strike a balance between hands-on service design practice and strategic decision making. You will move confidently between these roles and adapt your approach to meet the needs of different projects and stakeholders.

At practice level the work you will do with the Head of Design will inform and guide the practice strategy.

As a senior member of the design community, you will help drive design maturity across HM Land Registry by modelling best practice, communicating the value of user-centred design and championing the role of service design.

Check out the video below to find out what it is like working in our Transformation and Technology Directorate.

The role holder will have the below main duties:

• Lead and co-ordinate the service design activities in your multidisciplinary agile teams in your programme area to improve existing services and shape new ones that meet user needs and align with HM Land Registry’s policy objectives
• Partner with senior stakeholders and digital, data, and business leaders to identify opportunities across services and products, define complex problems through the lens of user needs and organisational priorities, and influence decision-making across your programme.
• Analyse and interpret user needs and business objectives across complex service areas to make expert decisions that balance the needs and outcomes of both parties
• Persuade senior stakeholders to implement design concepts and solutions that help re-imagine how services can be delivered end-to-end and from front to back
• Facilitate problem-framing, mapping, and service concept development workshops with multidisciplinary teams, senior project stakeholders, and users to ensure shared understanding and alignment on service improvements and build consensus around a design approach
• Lead and promote our design system and related Service design patterns; develop and maintain service design standards ensuring patterns and components are consistent, accessible, and easy to use across our digital products and services
• Work with your wider project team to ensure that services meet the digital service standard, establishing user-centred ways of working and coordinating and leading in service assessments as necessary to provide service design evidence to support the relevant points
• Present and deliver your/teams work, whether that is within your agile team, with the design community of practice that you will be part of, or outside of the organisation
• Mentor other service designers, contributing to their growth and development through providing feedback on their work, guidance, coaching and constructive challenge
• Collaborate with other service designers across government to identify and design scalable, cross-government design patterns and standards

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

To apply, you will need to complete the short application form and copy and paste your CV onto the online application form detailing your qualifications and work history.

Your CV will be assessed against the essential experience criteria detailed in the attached Job Description.

The Technical Criteria section (in no more than 250 words) should be used to demonstrate how you meet the following essential Technical Criteria.

• Understanding senior stakeholder needs, and using design to inform and persuade these audiences

The Personal Statement section (in no more than 500 words) should be used to outline your wider skills and experience for the role and detail how you meet the essential experience criteria listed below:

• A strong grounding and experience in end-to-end service design, from discovery to final delivery
• The ability to absorb large amounts of conflicting information and use it to produce simple designs, removing complexity from services and solving problems

In the event of a high volume of applications for this vacancy, an initial sift will be conducted on the CV and a full sift only carried out on those applications that pass the initial sift stage.

Please review your application form before clicking ‘submit’ – once you have submitted, you will not be able to amend your application. Ensure your application form is received by the closing date for receipt of applications – this is 23:55pm on the advertised date.

The sift will take place shortly after the closing date. If successful at shortlisting stage, you will be invited to attend an interview and deliver a pre-prepared presentation, from week commencing 6th October 2026. Further details will be provided on invitation to interview.

The blended interview will assess the essential technical criteria, experience and behaviours listed in the Job Description.

Please note that we will not be testing any of the desirable criteria throughout this process.

Candidates may refer to notes within their interview, but they should be used as a prompt only.

HMLR is accredited to the Disability Confident Scheme, which denotes organisations which have a positive attitude towards disabled people. Disabled applicants who meet the minimum essential criteria at the shortlisting stage may be invited to attend an interview. If you require the panel to consider a reasonable adjustment or there is anything else you would like the panel to take into consideration, you are asked to notify us of this at application stage where possible or during the process as soon as it becomes a requirement.

Candidates should be aware that any travel expenses incurred when attending interviews for this role will not be covered by HMLR.

Visa Sponsorship

Please note that we will only offer sponsorship for a skilled worker visa where a role is in a certain business critical category. This role does not meet that category, and we will not sponsor a skilled worker visa.

If you would like further information about the use of your personal data, please click on the link below:

Job Applicant Personal Information

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.