Softwire on cord

Softwire

Lead User Researcher

External position
London, UK
Remote anywhere
Hiring internally for Softwire?
Consultancy
Softwire is at the forefront of bespoke digital engineering, working with some of the UK's leading brands.
Posted
5 months ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: UX Researcher
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Usability, Product Strategy
Other skills considered: User Research, Agile

Logistics

Base salary: £75K - £90K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: On-site, Hybrid, Remote
Work from: Anywhere
Working Timezones: (UTC) London +/- 2 hours
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We re looking for a Lead User Researcher to join our Design and Research team who asks questions of us, our processes, and our clients.

The key is someone who can ask the right questions at the right time. Questions about work itself, about the conditions that enable us to produce our best work, and those that help us grow as individuals, as a team and as a company.

You ll operate in a blended role, between overseeing projects and being actively involved in research where you can have the greatest impact. You ll work closely with our clients in user-focused engagements and support us in developing long-term relationships.


What You ll Do

  • Plan and lead research across different stages of delivery, from discovery through to live.
  • Choose and apply the right research methods for the context, including interviews, usability testing, co-design and mixed-method approaches.
  • Work directly with users to understand their needs, behaviours, contexts and barriers, including people with access needs or in vulnerable circumstances.
  • Synthesise findings into clear, persuasive outputs that help teams and clients make confident product and service decisions.
  • Translate research insight into practical recommendations for service design, product strategy and delivery priorities.
  • Facilitate workshops, playback sessions and stakeholder discussions to build shared understanding and momentum around user needs.
  • Build strong, trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders, helping them embed user-centred ways of working.
  • Collaborate day to day with designers, engineers, product managers and delivery leads in multidisciplinary teams.
  • Advise clients and teams on research strategy, participant recruitment, ethics, consent and good research practice.
  • Provide quality assurance and senior oversight for research activities, ensuring high standards in approach, delivery and outputs.
  • Support public sector clients to meet the Government Service Standard and build inclusive, accessible services that work for diverse users.
  • Coach and mentor researchers and designers, helping develop the user-centred design capability across projects and within Softwire.
  • Contribute to Softwire s design and research practice by improving methods, tools, standards and thought leadership.
  • Advocate for the value of user research internally and externally, showing how evidence-led design can create better services and better outcomes.
  • Help scope new opportunities, shape proposals and contribute to bids, especially where user-centred design and public sector delivery are central.

What You Bring

  • 7+ years of experience working in a user research or related roles.
  • Deep expertise in user research methods and user-centred practice
  • Strong background in Government / public sector service delivery
  • Experience delivering against the Government Service Standard
  • With full accountability, has led research on complex agile projects with large teams.
  • Knowhow to guide organisations to adopt inclusive practices and apply what they learn to design and deliver accessible services that work for all users.
  • Can evaluate and implement tools and technologies that enhance delivery of user research.
  • Can engage, collaborate and influence key stakeholders, including senior decision makers, product managers, designers and engineers.
  • Experience managing other researchers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development.
  • Can provide senior oversight and support for user research activities and expert advice on methodology, approaches, tools, equipment, quality and standards
  • Can effectively scope user-centred design projects and define resource requirements.
  • Experience in presales and/or government procurement
  • Ability to achieve SC clearance

Company Benefits

  • Pension: Additional 5% of salary
  • 25 days annual leave (with the option to buy and sell)
  • Time off for company-wide morale activities, time off for charitable / CSR activities
  • Free annual eye test, income protection, cycle to work, electric vehicle lease schemes, and payroll charity donations.
Lead User Researcher at Softwire
Position posted 5 months ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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