Job Description
Reporting to: Head of Product Design
Visa sponsorship: UK national or visa holder preferred, but not a dealbreaker.
Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, right to work, media and social media.
You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by: 3rd July 2026
Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we'd welcome an open conversation as early as possible.
About Apolitical
Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.
Role overview
As Senior Product Designer, you'll design for civil servants, policy makers, and public sector leaders, people whose day-to-day decisions shape how healthcare, education, and infrastructure actually work. Leading with user-centred design thinking, you will help elevate the impact and quality of our products, services, and customer interactions. You'll own design decisions end-to-end across your remit, working as part of a tight-knit team of three senior designers covering a broad and ambitious product portfolio.
Remit
- Work with a high degree of autonomy across your areas of ownership, driving design decisions end-to-end while supporting priorities across the wider team.
- Raise the standard of design practice across the team, actively contributing to strong product design practices, user research, content, interaction, and service design.
- Help evolve and establish our design system libraries and ensure consistency across Apolitical's product suite as it scales.
- Translate user research and insight into clear design direction to ensure decisions are grounded in evidence, not assumptions.
- Work cross-functionally with product managers, engineers, learning designers, and other stakeholders across Apolitical to facilitate alignment, resolve ambiguity, and keep design central to team decisions.
- Communicate and present design decisions with confidence, articulating design rationale to stakeholders at all levels. Know how to present work in a way that builds trust, invites the right feedback, and moves things forward.
What success looks like
Within one month, you will...
- Build a strong understanding of Apolitical's mission, users, products, and strategic priorities.
- Establish relationships with key partners across Product, Engineering, Research, and Learning Design.
- Learn our design systems, product development processes, and ways of working.
- Deliver your first design contribution and participate actively in discovery, planning, and critique sessions.
Within three months, you will...
- Lead the design of a meaningful product initiative from discovery through delivery.
- Build trusted working relationships with stakeholders and become an embedded member of a product team.
- Identify and begin driving improvements to product experiences, design quality, or team processes.
Within six months, you will...
- Own a significant product area and help shape its future direction.
- Deliver measurable improvements to user experience and product outcomes.
- Contribute to the growth of the design practice through knowledge sharing, cultivating best practices, and the development of design standards.
- Be recognised as a trusted partner who elevates decision-making across Product, Engineering, Research, and Learning Design.
About you
This is a great fit if you...
- Enjoy having a wide scope, and you're comfortable moving across multiple products and workstreams without losing quality or focus.
- Can operate with autonomy, don't need a fully defined playbook to do your best work, and you're comfortable building process and structure collaboratively with the team.
- Have an interest in government services and motivated by designing for public sector outcomes.
- Are able to communicate design decisions and strategic design thinking to teams and stakeholders across the organisation.
- Know how to deploy AI effectively while maintaining human oversight for strategy, empathy, and ethics.
- Are proactive, agile and adaptable, balancing quality with pace.
This won't be the right role if you...
- Work best with a limited number of workstreams or projects.
- Are looking for a position with direct reports. This is not currently a people-management position, though there will be lots of cross-functional working and support.
- Prefer a slower-paced environment where priorities are stable and well-defined. We move fast and the roadmap is live.
- Need heavy direction to do your best work. You'll be surrounded by a collaborative team, leads, PMs, and cross-functional partners, but self-direction and proactive ownership are core expectations of this role.
Don't meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Stages in our hiring process
1. Culture interview [45m on Google Meet] - We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for working at Apolitical. This call is about finding candidates who will add to our culture. It's an opportunity to get to know you and for you to get to know us as an organisation, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about how we work.
2. Work sample [async] - TBC - We use work samples to see how you approach problems and give you a sense of the type of work you would be doing in the role. We use them because they're reliable in assessing and predicting performance in a role. Our work samples are designed to take less than 2 hours to complete.
3. Team interview [45m on Google Meet] - We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for the role. It's an opportunity to meet some of the people you might end up working with, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about the team and role.
4. Executive interview [30m in person] - One or two of our senior leaders build on conversations you've had with other team members to learn about your motivations and drivers at work and within the Apolitical context.