Design Lead - Product - BPL

Join us as a Design Lead, where you’ll build and own our design function from the ground up, shaping the end-to-end experience across seven value streams spanning the full merchant lifecycle. From onboarding and merchant portals to processing, point of sale, and value-added services, you’ll establish design as a core capability within the organisation. This role is about creating the standards, systems, and practices that make design indispensable as the portfolio evolves. You’ll partner closely with Product and Engineering leadership, working alongside Research and CX teams to translate insight into intuitive, scalable experiences for both small businesses and enterprise merchants. Initially hands-on, you’ll lead wireframing, prototyping, experimentation, and usability testing while building a robust, scalable design system. As the organisation grows, you’ll recruit and develop a high-performing team, embed strong design governance, and define what great design looks like across the portfolio. This is an opportunity to set the direction, raise the bar, and shape how design drives measurable business impact.

Essential Skills / Basic Qualifications:

• Significant experience building and leading design teams within digital product environments, including establishing design functions from the ground up

• Demonstrable portfolio spanning UX, UI, and service design, with the ability to operate hands-on as well as lead and develop others

• Experience creating, implementing, and scaling design systems across complex, multi-product organisations

• Proven track record of working within Product, Design, and Engineering partnerships to shape and influence product strategy

• Evidence of delivering measurable outcomes, such as improving task completion rates, increasing customer satisfaction, or scaling team capability

• Experience driving design quality and consistency across multiple products or value streams

Desired Skills / Preferred Qualifications:

• Background in payments, fintech, or wider financial services environments

• Experience designing merchant-facing products, such as portals, onboarding journeys, or self-service platforms

• Experience collaborating closely with dedicated research or customer insight teams

• Understanding of regulatory considerations and their influence on digital product design

• Experience building or contributing to externally facing design systems

You may be assessed on key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

This role is based in London.

About BPL

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 £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. 

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.

Purpose of the role

To create best in class user experiences that are aligned to customer needs and drive optimal commercial and customer outcomes. Creating products and journeys that meet customers informational, functional and emotional needs.  

Accountabilities

• Conceptualisation, design and implementation of user-centric digital banking products and experiences, ensuring alignment with customer needs, industry best practices and business objectives. Monitoring impact of design post launch through relevant metrics.   .
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams including product managers, developers, business analysts to translate business requirements into compelling user experiences. Efficiently communicate design rationale and advocate for user-centred design principles. Advocate and champion Design Principles within the organisation.   .
• Development of interactive prototypes and wireframes to visualise design concepts and validate solutions. Iterate designs based on feedback, incorporating changing technical and business requirements and user feedback.   .
• Evaluation of the technical feasibility, legal compliance, and potential risks associated with the development and launch of the new product. Securing governance oversite and providing design assurance.
• User research, usability testing and data analysis to gather insights in user behaviour, preferences and pain points. Utilise findings to inform design decisions and enhance the over user experience and translate these into commercial and customer outcomes.
• Stay abreast of emerging trends, technologies and design tools within the fintech and banking industry. Proactively identify opportunities for innovation and improvement in product design processes, tools and methodologies.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People 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..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

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.