Service Designer

At GitLab, Service Design is a discipline within User Experience Research (UXR). Service Designers collaborate with Product teams and stakeholders in the business to design and optimize end-to-end experiences across products, ensuring users can successfully achieve their goals throughout their lifecycle with GitLab.

Basic Responsibilities

Design and optimize user journeys across products to ensure consistent, seamless experiences
Partner with product, engineering, and business teams to implement service design solutions, facilitate workshops and co-create sessions
Conduct research and use research insights, stakeholder feedback, and data to inform and validate design decisions
Create and test service prototypes, refining them based on user feedback
Help teams adopt and implement new service solutions through clear roadmaps and frameworks
Contribute to a collaborative and open team culture by participating in peer reviews, sharing knowledge in team discussions, and mentoring others to strengthen the UX team’s collective expertise.

Basic Requirements

Ability to use GitLab
Systems Thinking: Ability to connect various touchpoints and service components
Design Communication: Conveying information using the most effective medium and language for the audience, e.g. creating clear service blueprints and flow diagrams
Strategic Design: Aligning service solutions with business capabilities and constraints
Collaborative Design and Implementation: Effectively identify and involve the right people and teams throughout the design and implementation process, work across teams, designing for feasibility, organizational alignment, and sustainability
Product & Business Acumen: Understanding business goals, user needs, and technical constraints
Change Management & Implementation: Ensuring design solutions are adopted and scalable
UX Research & Design Thinking: Leveraging qualitative research to inform service innovations

Levels

Service Designer (Intermediate)

The Service Designer reports to a UX Research Manager.

Intermediate Job Grade

The Service Designer is a grade 6.

Intermediate Responsibilities

Design and optimize user journeys across products to ensure consistent, seamless experiences
Partner with product, engineering, and business teams to implement service design solutions, facilitate workshops and co-create sessions
Conduct research and use research insights, stakeholder feedback, and data to inform and validate design decisions
Create and test service prototypes, refining them based on user feedback
Help teams adopt and implement new service solutions through clear roadmaps and frameworks
Contribute to a collaborative and open team culture by participating in peer reviews, sharing knowledge in team discussions, and mentoring others to strengthen the UX team’s collective expertise.

Intermediate Requirements

Ability to use GitLab
Systems Thinking: Ability to connect various touchpoints and service components
Design Communication: Conveying information using the most effective medium and language for the audience, e.g. creating clear service blueprints and flow diagrams
Strategic Design**: Aligning service solutions with business capabilities and constraints
Collaborative Design and Implementation: Effectively identify and involve the right people and teams throughout the design and implementation process, work across teams, designing for feasibility, organizational alignment, and sustainability
Product & Business Acumen: Understanding business goals, user needs, and technical constraints
Change Management & Implementation: Ensuring design solutions are adopted and scalable
UX Research & Design Thinking: Leveraging qualitative research to inform service innovations

Senior Service Designer

The Senior Service Designer reports to a UX Research Manager. Responsibilities and requirements follow from the above.

Senior Job Grade

The Senior Service Designer is a grade 7.

Senior Responsibilities

Design and enhance end-to-end user experiences by identifying pain points, optimizing journeys, and ensuring consistency across touchpoints.
Develop and implement service design frameworks for end-to-end journeys and the entire user lifecycle, considering complex personas and user segments.
Collaborate with product, engineering, and business teams to align on service design solutions and drive execution.
Leverage user research, stakeholder input, and operational data to validate and refine service improvements.
Prototype, test, and iterate service concepts to enhance interactions, streamline processes, and improve service effectiveness.
Support implementation and change management by working with operational teams on roadmaps and frameworks.
Lead strategic service design initiatives, identifying opportunities for innovation and system-wide optimizations.
Establish and evolve service design methodologies, ensuring consistency and scalability across the organization.
Mentor UX team members, providing guidance on complex service design challenges and strategic thinking.
Foster collaboration across teams, identifying patterns across service initiatives to drive cohesive user experiences.

Senior Requirements

System Thinking: Proven ability to design complex service ecosystems, identifying cross-product opportunities and holistic improvements.
User Centricity: Expertise in developing and applying persona frameworks and user lifecycle strategies to drive service design decisions.
Design Communication: Strong visualization and storytelling skills, using tools such as FigJam, Miro, or Figma to create service blueprints, wireframes, and mockups to align teams and leadership.
Strategic Design: Ability to translate business goals and user insights into scalable service strategies, influencing decision-making at all levels.
Collaborative Design and Implementation: Strong stakeholder engagement skills, experienced in leading workshops (both synchronous and asynchronous), and facilitating in depth discussion to drive cross-functional alignment.
Product & Business Acumen: Capability to balance user needs, business priorities, and operational constraints while ensuring compliance and scalability.
Change Management & Implementation: Experience in anticipating and addressing resistance to adoption in service changes.
UX Research & Design Thinking: Proficiency in user research methods, including surveys, interviews, usability testing, and data analysis, to refine and validate service solutions.
Influencing & Leadership: Advocate for service design best practices, shaping the discipline and fostering a culture of learning within the organization.
Coaching & Mentoring: Skilled in coaching and mentoring, supporting the growth of UX professionals through feedback and knowledge sharing.

Staff Service Designer

The Senior Service Designer reports to a UX Research Manager. Responsibilities and requirements follow from the above.

Staff Job Grade

The Senior Service Designer is a grade 8.

Staff Responsibilities

Lead service design initiatives that drive cross-functional alignment and strategic service improvements.
Develop and implement service design methodologies that improve consistency and scalability across teams.
Establish best practices for collaborative design, ensuring that service solutions align with both user needs and business objectives.
Work with leadership and stakeholders to influence organizational decision-making using service design insights.
Mentor and coach senior and intermediate service designers, fostering skill development and knowledge-sharing within the team.
Improve or create new service design methods to enhance workflows, tools, and research-driven insights.
Identify system-wide optimizations, designing for scalability, sustainability, and feasibility.
Conduct high-impact research and analysis to identify trends and opportunities in service ecosystems.
Develop roadmaps and influence business and technology strategies based on service design insights.
Collaborate with operations, product, and engineering teams to ensure service design recommendations are effectively executed.

Staff Requirements

System Thinking: Proven ability to identify cross-product opportunities and create scalable service ecosystems.
User Centricity: Expert at developing persona frameworks and lifecycle strategies to drive organisation-wide decisions.
Design Communication: Master visual storyteller, able to explore and establish new ways of communicating complex concepts.
Strategic Design: Demonstrated success in shaping business strategy through service design.
Collaborative Design and Implementation: Track record of leading complex initiatives across multiple teams, maintaining high engagements across the board.
Product & Business Acumen: Strong ability to balance user, business, and technical requirements at scale.
Change Management & Implementation: Expertise in driving adoption of major service transformations, anticipating and mitigating resistance to adoption for changes.
UX Research & Design Thinking: Skilled at designing and leading research programs that influence strategy.
Practice Leadership: Develop and refine service design methodologies, ensuring their effectiveness across teams.
Coaching & Mentoring: Demonstrated success in growing the capabilities of other UX-ers through feedback and structured guidance.

Hiring Process

Candidates for this position can expect the hiring process to follow the order below, although it may change depending on calendar availability. Please keep in mind that candidates can be declined from the position at any stage of the process.

Step 1: Recruiter Screening Call

Qualified candidates will be invited to schedule a 30 minute screening call with one of our Global Recruiters. In this call, we will discuss your experience, understand what you are looking for in a service design role, talk about your work and approach to service design, discuss your compensation expectations, and reasons why you want to join GitLab, and answer any questions you have.

Step 2: Portfolio Review and interview

After a successful screening call, we’ll ask for your portfolio to review. If your portfolio demonstrates the skills we’re looking for, you’ll have a 90-minute interview with the hiring manager and a UX researcher from the team.

During the interview, you’ll be asked several situational questions to help us learn how you have responded or would respond in certain scenarios. You should be prepared to discuss your service design process, details about how you collaborate with cross-functional teams, and how you approach your role.

You’ll also have an opportunity to present a case study from your portfolio. We’ll look for you to walk through a project so we can understand your process, approach, and philosophy to service design, the size and structure of the team you were a part of, the goals of the project, your research methods, service blueprinting, journey mapping, and how you synthesized research data to inform design decisions. We want to hear about the challenges you faced, the impact of your work, and how you collaborated with a wider team, including product, engineering, and operations. Be prepared to discuss your project in-depth for about 30 minutes.

Towards the end of the interview, you’ll be given some time to ask questions.

Step 3: Team Interviews

If you successfully pass the previous interviews, you’ll first meet with a Product Design Manager for a 1 hour interview. This interview will focus on assessing your research, strategy, and service design skills. The interviewer will want to understand how you have incorporated research and data into your work and get a feel for your understanding of service design fundamentals, methodologies, and system-wide thinking. Be prepared to answer questions around the soft skills needed for service designers and how you apply them in real-world scenarios.

The next and final interview will be with a product manager and an engineering manager. They’ll focus on your ability to collaborate with product, engineering, and operational teams and determine how well your skills align with the needs of a specific service design initiative.

Successful candidates will subsequently be made an offer through a video call or phone call.

Additional details about our process can be found on our hiring page.

About GitLab

GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is a community project to which over 2,200 people worldwide have contributed. We are an active participant in this community, trying to serve its needs and lead by example. We have one vision: everyone can contribute to all digital content, and our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.

We value results, transparency, sharing, freedom, efficiency, self-learning, frugality, collaboration, directness, kindness, diversity, inclusion and belonging, boring solutions, and quirkiness. If these values match your personality, work ethic, and personal goals, we encourage you to visit our primer to learn more. Open source is our culture, our way of life, our story, and what makes us truly unique.

Top 10 Reasons to Work for GitLab:

Mission: Everyone can contribute
Results: Fast growth, ambitious vision
Flexible Work Hours: Plan your day so you are there for other people & have time for personal interests
Transparency: Over 2,000 webpages in GitLab handbook, GitLab Unfiltered YouTube channel
Iteration: Empower people to be effective & have an impact, Merge Request rate, We dogfood our own product, Directly responsible individuals
Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging: A focus on gender parity, Team Member Resource Groups, other initiatives
Collaboration: Kindness, saying thanks, intentionally organize informal communication, no ego
Total Rewards: Competitive market rates for compensation, Equity compensation, global benefits (inclusive of office equipment)
Work/Life Harmony: Flexible workday, Family and Friends days
Remote Done Right: One of the world's largest all-remote companies, prolific inventor of remote best practices

See our culture page for more!

Work remotely from anywhere in the world. Curious to see what that looks like? Check out our remote manifesto and guides.

Last modified March 13, 2025: Add new job family - Service Designer (d4df5015)

View page source - Edit this page - please contribute.