Staff Service Designer

Airbnb; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading hospitality platform in the United Kingdom seeks a Staff Service Designer to lead service design initiatives and shape customer experiences. The ideal candidate will have over 10 years of experience in service design, with expertise in journey mapping and stakeholder alignment. This role involves collaborating across teams to improve delivery processes and ensure a coherent service journey. Join us to enhance our innovative offerings and drive engagement across diverse stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in service design or systems-oriented experience design.
• Deep fluency in service design methods.
• Excellent visual, verbal, and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead service design efforts across major initiatives.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineers to design coherent experiences.
• Design and facilitate workshops to align stakeholders.

Skills

Service design methods

Experience prototyping

Stakeholder engagement

Journey mapping

Blueprinting

Collaboration skills

Job description

Airbnb was born in 2007 when two hosts welcomed three guests to their San Francisco home, and has since grown to over 5 million hosts who have welcomed over 2 billion guest arrivals in almost every country across the globe. Every day, hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in a more authentic way.

The Community you will join:

As a Staff Service Designer, you’ll shape the end-to-end systems that support great stays, scalable hospitality, and business sustainability. You’ll work across disciplines, partnering with operations, product, engineering, design, business, and more, to orchestrate how Airbnb’s services are delivered and experienced by guests, Hosts, and internal teams alike. Service Designers bring systems thinking, front-line research, and facilitation to the work of aligning product capabilities, operational processes, and human interactions. We bring diverse business functions together to design journeys that unfold across time, teams, and channels.

The difference you will make:

The Staff Service Designer will focus on complex, cross-functional challenges where the customer experience is shaped by touchpoints that span multiple channels — digital, human, and environmental. You’ll lead service visioning, blueprinting, and journey orchestration, often in areas where business goals require operations, support, or in-person delivery to succeed. You’ll connect the frontstage and backstage, helping to ensure that what we design for users is not only engaging but also deliverable and sustainable in the real world. Your work will help bring coherence to how we show up across the entire service journey. This is an individual contributor (IC) role reporting to a Manager or Director of Design.

A typical day:

• Lead service design efforts across major initiatives, from current-state mapping to future-state modeling, aligning stakeholders on where to intervene and how
• Collaborate with product managers, experience designers, operations experts, engineers, researchers, support, and policy to design coherent, multi-touchpoint experiences
• Design and facilitate workshops and other rituals to align stakeholders and develop a shared understanding of service challenges and opportunities
• Produce service blueprints, journey maps, process models, and frameworks that connect platform capabilities and offline experience delivery
• Build relationships with field and support teams to understand how services are actually delivered and where design can improve clarity, reliability, and quality
• Influence strategic decisions by identifying how roles, policies, and business processes affect the end-to-end experience.
• Drive alignment and clarity in ambiguous spaces by zooming out to the system and helping teams prioritize with shared intent
• Contribute to evolving the craft of service design at Airbnb through practice excellence, collaboration, and evangelism.

Your expertise:

• 10+ years of experience in service design or systems-oriented experience design
• Deep fluency in service design methods, including journey mapping, blueprinting, experience prototyping, ecosystem modeling, facilitation, and storyboarding
• Experience designing and scaling services that rely on both digital tools and offline delivery, including operational teams, physical spaces, and human interactions
• Expert-level collaboration skills and ability to build shared understanding across business functions with diverse goals and vocabulary
• Proven ability to define service models and capability requirements that span product, operations, and business teams
• Confident leading through ambiguity and working at varying levels of abstraction, from high-level service strategy to front-line delivery mechanics
• Excellent visual, verbal, and written communication skills; compelling storytelling and stakeholder engagement
• Experience with 0→1 service launches, or leading major service transformation efforts spanning multiple business functions

Our Commitment To Inclusion & Belonging:

Airbnb is committed to working with the broadest talent pool possible. We believe diverse ideas foster innovation and engagement, and allow us to attract creatively-led people, and to develop the best products, services and solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply.

We strive to also provide a disability inclusive application and interview process. If you are a candidate with a disability and require reasonable accommodation in order to submit an application, please contact us at: [e-mail]. Please include your full name, the role you’re applying for and the accommodation necessary to assist you with the recruiting process.

We ask that you only reach out to us if you are a candidate whose disability prevents you from being able to complete our online application.