Head of Design - BPL

The Opportunity

Imagine a fintech with GBP 400m in fresh funding, tasked with transforming merchant payments infrastructure. That’s Barclaycard Payments right now.

We’re looking for a design leader to build and own the design function from the ground up. UX, UI, service design, design systems - across seven value streams that span the full merchant lifecycle: Servicing, Capture (merchant portal), Activation (onboarding), Processing, Point of Sale, Value Added Services, and Gateway. The immediate priority sits with the customer-facing streams, but the role spans the full portfolio as it matures.

This isn’t a role where you inherit a mature design team and keep things ticking. This is a role where you create the design capability, set the standards, and make it indispensable. You’ll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership, work alongside a dedicated Research function, and be responsible for translating customer insight into experiences that actually work - for small businesses taking their first card payment and for enterprise merchants processing millions.

🎯 The Problem We’re Solving

We need someone who can take ownership of design quality and consistency across these value streams, build a scalable design system, and progressively build in-house capability. We have colleagues that own broader customer research that you can draw on and additional colleagues looking at customer journey mapping and CX strategy with an operational lens. You’ll need to coordinate with both teams to ensure research, product design and operational design are pulling in the same direction.

💡 What You’ll Own

• Design across value streams - You’re the design authority across the portfolio, starting with the customer-facing streams and expanding as the organisation matures
• Hands-on design and experimentation - Wireframes, prototypes, visual design, usability testing, A/B tests. This is hands-on initially - you do the work yourself while progressively building a team around you
• Design system - Build, own, and scale a component library and design language that ensures consistency across all merchant-facing products and enables faster, higher-quality delivery
• Design operations and governance - Establish design rituals (critiques, retrospectives), set quality standards, define design principles, and champion user-centred design at leadership level
• Building the function - Recruit, coach, and develop designers as the organisation scales. You’re setting up a function that outlasts you, not running a one-person show indefinitely
• Key metrics - You’ll help define what good looks like. We’d expect design maturity, user experience quality, design system adoption, and delivery throughput to be in the mix - but we want your perspective on what to measure

🧠 Who This Is For

Your background:

• Significant experience building and leading design teams in digital product environments - you’ve built design functions, not just worked in them
• Strong portfolio across UX, UI, and service design. You can do the work yourself and you can lead others doing it
• Experience creating and scaling design systems in complex, multi-product organisations
• Track record of working within product trios (Product, Design, Engineering) and influencing product strategy through design
• Quantifiable impact - “reduced task completion time by X%”, “improved merchant satisfaction from Y to Z”, “scaled design team from A to B”

Your approach:

• You can run a usability session on Monday, present a design strategy to the exec team on Tuesday, review component specs with engineering on Wednesday, and facilitate a design critique on Thursday
• You think in systems - not just “design this screen” but “what’s the design language, where does this pattern repeat, and how do we make it scalable?”
• You understand that in a regulated environment, the best design is the one that makes the right thing the easiest thing to do
• You bridge research and delivery - you translate research insights into compelling user experiences that engineers can build, and you measure whether they worked
• You run experiments, not just deliver designs - A/B tests, prototype validations, behavioural tracking. You want to know if the design actually changed anything
• You know how to work collaboratively with external partners while building internal capability from scratch
• You have a view on how AI is changing design - tooling, workflow, prototyping, research synthesis - and you’re hands on experienced using these tools and actively exploring what that means for how design teams work

Your design philosophy:

• User-centred but commercially aware - great design serves both the merchant and the business
• Pragmatic - you deliver at pace and iterate, rather than pursuing perfection in isolation
• Inclusive - you design for accessibility and diverse merchant needs as standard, not as an afterthought
• Systematic - you build reusable patterns and components, not bespoke one-offs

Bonus:

• Experience in payments, fintech, or financial services
• Familiarity with merchant-facing products (portals, onboarding, self-service)
• Experience working alongside dedicated research functions
• Understanding of regulatory constraints and how they shape design decisions
• Have built or contributed to a public-facing design system

✋ The Context

This is a bank. There’s governance, there are committees, and some things move slower than you’d like.

But this isn’t a typical bank role. The Brookfield partnership creates genuine momentum for change. You’ll have executive backing to challenge how things are done. And you’ll be joining a team that’s actively building a product-led culture from the ground up.

This is a permanent role because design capability is a long-term investment. We’re not looking for someone to parachute in and deliver a project. We’re looking for someone to build a function that lasts - someone who’ll still be here when the design system is mature, the team is established, and the agency dependency is a memory.

If you want to build something from scratch - with real investment behind it and real impact ahead - this is your opportunity.

About Barclaycard Payments

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately GBP 400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years.

Purpose of the role

To lead and facilitate human-centred design excellence as part of the BUK Pod transformation strategy, to drive innovation, meet customer needs, and ensure the bank's long-term success and competitive edge. Advocating for customers in business decision making and balancing commercial aims, delivery feasibility and regulatory requirements with high quality customer experiences.  

Accountabilities

• Need identification and distillation to support the creation of balanced business cases which factor in customer appeal and feasibility and drive positive customer outcomes.
• Delivery of high-quality insight and design outputs across all practice disciplines, any project budgets allocated to Insights and Design, including the management of budget related to research or design agencies or the use of a contingent workforce.
• Problem statement facilitation and prioritisation across the business areas, lead solution discovery, co-ordinate solution/service designs taking accountability for solution integrity across Barclays.
• Evaluation of programme or product risks to mitigate potential risks through iterative design and testing ahead of customer launch. Building a culture that understands the value of customer-focused, human-centric design.
• Customer research, listening, testing and market scanning processes within specific business areas. Monitor market trends including competitor insights and wider macro trends. Incorporate colleague feedback into investigations into service provision. Test designs and experience through prototypes with target customers and colleagues to identify areas for improvement to refine products or service experiences before launch. Enabling identified areas for improvement to be translated into clear customer and commercial benefits.
• Implementation of agile ways of working within teams, enabling greater efficiency across the business and technology.
• Delivering of accurate insight on core CX outcomes and building stronger awareness and engagement around critical customer metrics, enabling the business to better identify new opportunities, amplify existing plans and identify potential risks. Promotes and builds a stronger customer experience culture with stakeholders.

Director Expectations

• To manage a business function, providing significant input to function wide strategic initiatives. Contribute to and influence policy and procedures for the function and plan, manage and consult on multiple complex and critical strategic projects, which may be business wide..
• They manage the direction of a large team or sub-function, leading other people managers and embedding a performance culture aligned to the values of the business. Or for an individual contributor, they lead organisation wide projects and act as deep technical expert and thought leader, identifying new ways of working and collaborating cross functionally. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Provide expert advice to senior functional management and committees to influence decisions made outside of own function, offering significant input to function wide strategic initiatives.
• Manage, coordinate and enable resourcing, budgeting and policy creation for a significant sub-function.
• Escalates breaches of policies / procedure appropriately.
• Foster and guide compliance, ensure regulations are observed that relevant processes in place to facilitate adherence.
• Focus on the external environment, regulators, or advocacy groups to both monitor and influence on behalf of Barclays, when appropriate.
• Demonstrate extensive knowledge of how the function integrates with the business division / Group to achieve the overall business objectives.
• Maintain broad and comprehensive knowledge of industry theories and practices within own discipline alongside up-to-date relevant sector / functional knowledge, and insight into external market developments / initiatives.
• Use interpretative thinking and advanced analytical skills to solve problems and design solutions in often complex/ sensitive situations.
• Exercise management authority to make significant decisions and certain strategic decisions or recommendations within own area.
• Negotiate with and influence stakeholders at a senior level both internally and externally.
• Act as principal contact point for key clients and counterparts in other functions/ businesses divisions.
• Mandated as a spokesperson for the function and business division.

All Senior Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.