Staff Service Designer

Summary

Join Code for America as a Staff Service Designer and play a pivotal role in transforming public services. You will lead service design efforts, collaborating with cross-functional teams to design end-to-end user experiences for government programs. As an experienced individual contributor, you will analyze problems, create solutions, and mentor junior designers. You'll work with government partners and stakeholders to improve program outcomes, focusing on measurable impact. This role requires strong analytical and creative thinking, expertise in service design methodologies, and a passion for improving public services. The position offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including professional development opportunities and a supportive work environment.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of service design, design strategy, and/or user research experience, with 2 years at a senior or staff level
• Demonstrated ability to design, test, implement, and measure multi-channel experiences that include a digital product delivery
• A portfolio of service design work that outlines your design process, deliverables, and impact
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple high-priority initiatives and complex workstreams, including early-stage product strategy as well as delivery of tactical and incremental design improvements
• Willingness to travel for research and partner collaboration (up to 10% of the time)
• Direct experience working in civic service design, civic tech, or social impact design in the public sector
• Experience mentoring designers and communicating the value of design to stakeholders and cross-functional partners
• Ability to work collaboratively within a multidisciplinary team
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile software development environment
• Passion for our mission of making government services better for people who need them

Responsibilities

• Independently lead service design execution across multiple large and complex projects or workstreams as an individual contributor
• Demonstrate strong analytical and creative thinking on how to improve the end-to-end, front-to-back, and multi-modal user experience across your assigned product, project, or portfolio
• Highlight potential gaps and areas of opportunity for improvement across the client journey, focusing holistically on all channels of interaction
• Use common service design methods and artifacts to document proposed service interventions and clearly communicate your understanding to the team and government partners of current and proposed future state of a service, such as journey maps, service blueprints, system diagrams, and ecosystem maps
• Define ways in which a service intervention’s impact can be measured and how impact metrics ladder up to stakeholder goals and user needs
• Participate in planning and carrying out user research activities and synthesizing research findings, typically in partnership with qualitative user researchers
• Test designs and hypotheses by creating low, mid, and high-fidelity prototypes. Use these to generate useful feedback and iterate towards the best solution for people impacted
• Understand the relevant policies, infrastructure, technology, and system constraints that affect the end user experience with a given government service
• Partner closely with individual contributors and managers from other disciplines (e.g., engineering, research, product, data science, and program) to find elegant but practical solutions to design challenges
• Design and facilitate collaborative sessions/workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather input on design directions, identify priority user stories to focus on, and drive alignment around strategic design directions
• Develop and maintain collaborative, professional relationships with government partners, CBOs, and advisory consultants necessary to achieve successful project outcomes
• Deliver presentations to internal and external partners that capture attention and convey key messages succinctly, using storytelling techniques and visual communication to highlight client and worker experience
• Participate in project or portfolio conversations and provide your input as a service design subject matter expert to inform strategic decisions about project and product direction
• Participate in operational and best-practices initiatives within the Service Design discipline and the broader User Experience department
• Act as a mentor to support more junior design staff in their work by pairing, coaching, and raising the quality bar of outputs
• Deliver constructive critical design feedback to UX and service design peers
• Serve has a champion of Service Design across the organization, participating in teaching and learning opportunities, and evangelizing human-centered design
• Contribute to organization's credibility and thought leadership in design
• Other duties as assigned

Preferred Qualifications

Native or professionally proficient fluency (written and verbal) in Spanish

Benefits

• Full benefits package with options up to 100% coverage toward select medical, dental, and vision plans
• Employer contributes up to 80% of the cost towards dependent and family coverage
• Code for America employees may work remotely across the US
• Code for America employees main residence must be within the US
• Full-time employees work 40 hours per week, Monday - Friday
• Collaborative working hours: we aim to hold all internal meetings between 10 AM - 3 PM PT. We expect all Code for America staff to be available during these set working hours
• Open personal time off, a minimum of 16 paid holidays, and an org-wide closure from Christmas Day through New Year's Day
• Paid sick time; up to 96 hours annually
• Competitive paid parental and family leave
• 4 weeks of paid sabbatical after 4 years of service, with an option of up to 4 additional weeks of unpaid time away
• Laptop provided
• $700 remote environment setup; $200 stipend and up to $500 reimbursement, in accordance with our equipment policy
• Cell phone and/or internet reimbursement of $50 per month
• $1000 annual (per calendar year) stipend towards professional development; prorated at time of hire
• Up to $1000 of professional development funds can be rolled over each year, up to a maximum of $2000
• Employees under 3 years are eligible for a 100% employer match of up to 3% of employee contribution
• Employees with 3+ years are eligible for an additional 50% employer contribution over 3%, to a maximum of 5%
• The offer targets for this role range from $128,945 to $157,850 , annually