About the Role
This is a 6 months contract role in Banking & Finance
The Innovation and Venture Designer is a senior individual contributor, reporting to and supporting the Head of Innovation and Design, for our client. They will be responsible for defining, shaping, and delivering customer-centric digital and service experiences. The role operates at the intersection of design excellence, innovation methodology, and commercial execution, supporting venture creation, incubation, and scale. The role holder is accountable for applying human-centred design and product design expertise to materially improve customer outcomes, accelerate venture validation, and enhance product-market fit.
This role carries Director-level accountability, autonomy, and influence, partnering closely with venture CEOs, product leaders, engineers, and senior stakeholders.
The role involves key accountabilities across various domains including UX/UI & Product Design Leadership, Innovation & Human-Centred Design Execution, Strategic Partnership & Stakeholder Influence, Delivery & Outcomes, AI-Augmented Design & Venture Orchestration, Risk Management, and Governance.
Responsibilities
UX/UI & Product Design Leadership
- Own end-to-end experience design for digital products and platforms across the venture lifecycle (discovery to scale).
- Translate customer needs, business strategy, and technical constraints into intuitive, usable, and scalable design solutions.
- Define and maintain design standards, interaction patterns, and design systems across ventures where appropriate.
- Ensure accessibility, usability, and consistency across web, mobile, and platform experiences.
- Act as a design authority, providing expert critique and guidance to improve design quality and coherence.
Innovation & Human-Centred Design Execution
- Lead design-led discovery and innovation activities including user research, journey mapping, service design, and problem framing.
- Use AI to accelerate synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research, while safeguarding against bias and hallucination.
- Apply methodologies such as Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Jobs-to-Be-Done, and rapid experimentation to validate concepts.
- Support venture incubation by shaping value propositions, MVP definitions, and experimentation roadmaps.
- Facilitate and contribute to design sprints, ideation sessions, and co-creation workshops with internal and external stakeholders.
Strategic Partnership & Stakeholder Influence
- Act as a trusted design partner to venture CEOs, senior product managers, and leadership.
- Influence strategic product and venture decisions through insight, evidence, and design rationale.
- Balance customer needs, commercial objectives, regulatory considerations, and delivery constraints.
Delivery & Outcomes
- Ensure delivery of high quality design outputs, whether created directly, co-created with teams, or generated via AI assisted workflows.
- Establish design quality standards, evaluation criteria, and review mechanisms for AI generated and human generated outputs.
- Focus personal effort on high leverage work (problem framing, concept definition, experience architecture, critical decisions).
- Partner closely with engineering and delivery teams to ensure faithful and efficient implementation.
- Operate effectively across multiple ventures simultaneously, prioritising work based on strategic impact.
- Drive measurable improvements in usability, engagement, conversion, and time to market.
AI-Augmented Design & Venture Orchestration
- Design and operate AI-augmented discovery, ideation, and prototyping workflows, combining human insight with AI agents and tools.
- Act as an orchestrator of AI agents (e.g. research synthesis, concept generation, usability analysis, rapid prototyping), setting clear intent, constraints, and quality bars.
- Define human-in-the-loop checkpoints to ensure design quality, differentiation, ethical use, and regulatory compliance.
- Continuously evaluate where AI can safely accelerate venture discovery, validation, and delivery — and where human judgment is essential.
- Partner with product and engineering to integrate AI-native workflows into the venture delivery lifecycle.
Risk Management
- Adhere to Policies and Procedures.
- Act and escalate quickly when any risk and control weakness become apparent and ensure they are addressed within an appropriate timeframe and escalated through the relevant committees.
- Work with colleagues to deliver expected business performance results within cost constraints and applicable risk/control framework to ensure that the Group's ability to remain within risk appetite is not materially threatened.
Qualifications
- 10–15+ years experience across facilitation, product design, product commercialisation, innovation design, UX/UI and/or consulting.
- Experience working in AI augmented or automation rich product environments, leveraging AI tools or agents to accelerate discovery and delivery.
- Ability to define intent, constraints, and evaluation criteria for AI generated outputs across design and innovation workflows.
- Strong systems thinking: comfortable designing workflows, guardrails, and governance rather than only artefacts.
- Proven track record designing complex, customer-facing digital products at scale.
- Strong expertise in UX research, interaction design, visual design, and prototyping (Claude Code/Cursor in addition to Figma).
- Experience operating at Director-level influence without formal people management.
- Strong understanding of agile product development and cross-functional delivery models.
