Staff Service Designer

Code for America

Staff Service Designer at Code for America improving public services through user-centered design. Collaborating with multidisciplinary teams and mentoring junior designers.

Posted 6/24/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $128,945 - $157,850 per yearWebsite

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design Process: Independently lead service design execution across multiple large and complex projects or workstreams as an individual contributor.
Design Process: 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.
Design Process: Understand the relevant policies, infrastructure, technology, and system constraints that affect the experience within a given government service.
Design Process: Highlight potential gaps and areas of opportunity for improvement across the whole service, including client, staff, or processes, focusing holistically on all channels of interaction.
Design Process: 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.
Design Process: Define ways in which a service intervention’s impact can be measured and how impact metrics ladder up to stakeholder goals and user needs.
Design Process: Participate in planning and carrying out user research activities and synthesizing research findings, typically in partnership with qualitative user researchers.
Design Process: Create and test design interventions and/or hypotheses by creating low, mid, or high-fidelity prototypes. Use these to generate useful feedback and iterate towards the best solution for people impacted.
Partnership and Collaboration: 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.
Partnership and Collaboration: 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.
Partnership and Collaboration: Develop and maintain collaborative, professional relationships with government partners, CBOs, and advisory consultants necessary to achieve successful project outcomes.
Partnership and Collaboration: 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.
Partnership and Collaboration: 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.
Team Health and Mentorship: Participate in operational and best-practices initiatives within the Service Design discipline and the broader User Experience department.
Team Health and Mentorship: Act as a mentor to support more junior design staff in their work by pairing, coaching, and raising the quality bar of outputs.
Team Health and Mentorship: Deliver constructive critical design feedback to UX and service design peers.
Team Health and Mentorship: Serve has a champion of Service Design across the organization, participating in teaching and learning opportunities, and evangelizing human-centered design.
Team Health and Mentorship: Contribute to the organization's credibility and thought leadership in design.

Requirements

What you’ll need

6+ years of service design and/or design strategy experience, with 2 years at a senior or staff level
Direct experience working in government services, public policy, civic service design, civic tech, or social impact design in the public sector
Demonstrated ability to design, test, implement, and measure complex multi-channel experiences that include technology systems, business processes, policy constraints, and client-facing artifacts
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 discovery as well as delivery of tactical design improvements to existing processes and technical systems
Experience mentoring designers and communicating the value of design to stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
Willingness to travel for research and partner collaboration (up to 10% of the time)
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.
Curiosity about emerging AI tools and a commitment to using them responsibly and effectively
A deep commitment to Code for America's mission of making government services work well for the people who need them most

Benefits

Comp & perks

Leadership and teammates who share a strong work ethic and values, and who respect and care for one another
A collaborative, cross-functional, hardworking, and joyful environment
Laptop provided
A one-time $700 payment for remote environment setup; $200 stipend (in first paycheck) and up to $500 reimbursement, in accordance with our equipment policy
Cell phone and/or internet reimbursement of $50 per month
$500 annual (per calendar year) stipend towards professional development; prorated at time of hire
Up to $500 of professional development funds can be rolled over each year, up to a maximum of $1000
Training / guidance for staff required to utilize AI as part of their role, plus opportunities for employees to gain AI-related skills to support job and career growth
Employees receive a 100% employer match on the first 3% of contributions.
Employees with 3+ years of service receive an additional 50% match on contributions between 3% and 5%, for a maximum employer contribution of 5%.
At least one no cost health insurance option for full-time employees for employee-only coverage
A minimum of 80% of the cost of dependent 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 (subject to manager approval), a minimum of 14 paid holidays, and an org-wide closure from Christmas Day through New Year's Day
Paid sick time; up to 96 hours annually
17 weeks of paid parental and family leave
3 weeks of paid sabbatical after 5 years of service

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Hard Skills & Tools

service designdesign strategyuser researchprototypingjourney mappingservice blueprintssystem diagramsimpact measurementmulti-channel experience designagile software development

Soft Skills

analytical thinkingcreative thinkingcollaborationcommunicationmentorshipstorytellingcritical feedbackrelationship buildingproject managementcuriosity