Senior UX Designer - 12 Months FTC

Company Description Come join us and make a difference in the world! Discover more at www.necsws.com Please note this role can be remote or Hybrid, Subject to Location Job Description We’re looking for an experienced Senior UX Designer to lead the user experience strategy and design direction for our mission-critical control room software programme. Used by emergency services and public safety organisations, the platform supports incident management, resource coordination and operational decision-making in fast-moving, high-pressure environments. Working closely with multidisciplinary teams, customers and stakeholders, you’ll balance user needs, operational requirements, technical constraints and business goals. You’ll combine hands-on design delivery with design leadership, establishing a clear UX roadmap and ensuring multiple Scrum teams can deliver against a shared experience vision. As the senior designer on the programme, you’ll provide leadership, support and constructive challenge to other designers while helping shape effective ways of working, reusable design patterns and design system adoption. You’ll balance immediate delivery needs with longer-term experience improvements, ensuring design quality remains high as the programme evolves. While embedded within the Public Safety team, you’ll also be part of NEC Digital Studio’s Product Design practice, working alongside UX designers, interaction designers, service designers and user researchers. You’ll benefit from a strong user-centred design community while helping improve standards, best practice and consistency across our design approaches and systems. What You’ll Be Doing UX Strategy, Planning & Delivery Lead the UX strategy and design direction for the control room programme, developing and maintaining a roadmap aligned to user needs, product priorities, technical dependencies and delivery plans. Plan and coordinate design activity across multiple Scrum teams, ensuring work is prioritised, evidenced and ready to support delivery at pace. Anticipate upcoming design requirements, identify risks, dependencies and opportunities, and help inform prioritisation decisions. Continuously improve design processes, ways of working and team efficiency while maintaining high standards of design quality. Design Leadership Provide leadership, support, critique and mentoring to designers across the programme, helping establish effective ways of working and a coherent user experience. Advocate for user-centred design, helping increase UX maturity across teams and disciplines through coaching, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Establish practical standards, principles and design patterns that enable consistent delivery at scale. Act as an escalation point for design quality, consistency and delivery risks. Hands-On UX Design Lead and contribute directly to the design of complex user journeys, workflows and interactions, producing high-quality wireframes, prototypes and implementation-ready designs. Apply research, accessibility requirements, analytics and delivery constraints to inform and iterate design solutions. Evaluate alternative approaches, communicate trade-offs clearly and ensure effective use of design systems, reusable components and established patterns. Create and maintain design documentation to support collaboration and successful implementation. Research & Evidence Independently plan, conduct and synthesise user research and usability testing activities, while collaborating with specialist researchers where appropriate. Use evidence and insights to shape design direction, challenge assumptions, reduce risk and identify opportunities for improvement. Translate research findings into actionable design recommendations, product decisions and roadmap priorities. Communicate design rationale clearly through evidence, user needs and measurable outcomes. Stakeholder Collaboration Build strong relationships with customers, stakeholders and multidisciplinary teams, facilitating workshops and collaborative design activities. Challenge requirements constructively, helping teams balance user needs, operational realities, technical constraints and business goals. Communicate design rationale, risks, opportunities and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences. Accessibility & Best Practice Champion accessibility, usability and inclusive design throughout the delivery lifecycle. Work closely with engineers to ensure design intent is delivered effectively and contribute to the evolution of design systems and best practices across the organisation. Qualifications Essential Must be eligible for UK Security Clearance Significant experience designing complex enterprise, case management, operational or internal digital products, with a portfolio demonstrating measurable outcomes. Experience leading and supporting UX or Product Designers, while coordinating design activity across multiple delivery teams or workstreams. Ability to develop and maintain a UX roadmap, ensuring design activity is planned and prioritised to support product objectives and delivery at pace. Strong hands-on user-centred design experience, with the ability to personally deliver high-quality user journeys, interaction designs, wireframes, prototypes and production-ready designs, while using research and evidence to inform design decisions. Strong stakeholder management, workshop facilitation and communication skills, with confidence challenging assumptions and guiding evidence-led decision making. Experience working effectively within multidisciplinary teams, balancing user needs, operational realities, technical feasibility and delivery constraints. Strong understanding of accessibility and inclusive design, and experience designing within regulatory, compliance-driven or policy-driven environments. Experience owning, evolving and applying design systems (including Material UI), reusable components and design patterns to support consistency, scalability and efficient delivery. Desirable Experience working with public safety, emergency services, policing, fire, ambulance, justice or similarly complex operational environments. Experience designing products that span multiple screens, user roles, workflows or interconnected systems, maintaining a coherent experience across complex journeys. Experience working with and integrating established industry design systems (for example Material Design, Human Interface Guidelines or similar) alongside organisation-specific design systems. Experience using AI-powered design, research or prototyping tools appropriately to improve efficiency while maintaining design quality and user-centred decision-making. Experience designing AI-enabled product experiences, understanding where AI can add value to users and where more traditional interaction patterns may be more appropriate. Additional Information We pride ourselves in offering an excellent benefits package, including an above average pension scheme. When you join the team at NEC Software Solutions, you are provided with the following: Private Medical Cover funded by NEC for Employees (with the option to add family members at an additional cost) 25 days paid holiday with the option to buy/sell (FTE) 4 x basic salary life assurance cover funded by NEC (with the option to increase cover at an additional cost) A Group Pension Plan with fantastic employer contributions up to a maximum of 8.5% A selection of flexible benefits to suit your individual needs All colleagues get free access to LinkedIn Learning. Over 15000 courses covering a huge breadth of subjects. Learn about what you like, when you like, how you like. OTHER INFORMATION Candidates must be able to demonstrate a pre-existing right to work and travel within the UK. Documentary evidence will be required. All offers are subject to satisfactory vetting, references and occupational health checks. Depending on the nature of the role a Disclosure Barring Service (DBS) check may also be required. NEC Software Solutions is an equal opportunities employer, welcoming applications from all communities. If you require any reasonable adjustments or have specific accessibility needs during the recruitment or interview process, please feel free to share these with us. We are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accommodating experience for all candidates. Who We Are: We’re NEC Software Solutions (part of global tech giant NEC Corporation). While you read this ad, our software is helping to dispatch ambulances, support families, keep trains on the move, locate missing people and even test the hearing of newborn babies. Working with us, you’ll be helping our 3,000+ employees push the boundaries of what’s possible and support amazing public services. We work with governments, hospitals, police forces, housing providers, local authorities and more. We help them pay financial support faster, speed up treatments for patients and respond to emergencies in the right way. The more we do, the more our customers can do for others. And together, we make a world of difference. We’d love your help. And we’ll support you all the way.