Job Summary

•    The Head, Design is accountable for defining, governing, and continuously evolving a consistent, premium and experience-led design language across the global corporate workplace and retail portfolio.
•    The role ensures that workplaces, retail branches, and client-facing environments deliver against brand ambition, customer and employee experience outcomes, and commercial objectives, with a strong emphasis on hospitality, service quality, and consistency at scale.
•    Acting as the single point of design authority, this role leads the evolution of the Design Hub model, governs design standards and approvals, and partners closely with design supply partners responsible for guideline governance and end-to-end delivery across markets. The role also drives innovation in design delivery, including the responsible use of AI-enabled tools, to improve efficiency, accuracy, and quality of outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

Design Strategy, Brand Expression & Consistency
•    Define, own, and continuously evolve global workplace and retail design principles that express a premium, hospitality-led brand experience across all physical touchpoints.
•    Translate Brand, Client Experience (CX), and Employee Experience (EX) strategies into human-centred, experience-led physical environments.
•    Establish and govern global design standards, guidelines, and toolkits, ensuring clarity, consistency, and scalability across markets and typologies.
•    Drive measurable consistency across the estate, balancing global brand alignment with local market, regulatory, and cultural requirements.
•    Act as final design authority, approving deviations, managing exceptions, and resolving escalations to protect design integrity.

Design Hub Leadership, Innovation & AI Enablement
•    Lead the evolution of the Design Hub model to improve efficiency, quality, accuracy, and speed of design delivery across workplace and retail environments.
•    Embed clear governance, workflows, and quality controls within the Design Hub to ensure reliable and repeatable outcomes in line with the PDM process
•    Champion the use of AI-enabled design tools and digital solutions to support guideline compliance, design consistency, scenario testing, and scalable delivery.
•    Ensure innovation in design delivery enhances outcomes while maintaining strong design judgment, governance, and risk controls.

Supply Partner Governance & End-to-End Design Delivery
•    Lead and manage global and regional design supply partners accountable for guideline governance and end-to-end design delivery.
•    Set clear expectations for quality, performance, cost, and timelines across concept, detailed design, and delivery phases.
•    Lead governance forums, peer reviews, and quality checkpoints to ensure design intent is protected from concept through to handover.
•    Drive continuous improvement in partner capability, performance, and value through structured feedback, benchmarking, and performance reviews.

Workplace & Client environment Design 
•    Provide strategic design leadership across corporate workplaces, headquarters, regional hubs, trading floors, and specialist environments.
•    Ensure workplace designs support client and employee experience, productivity, collaboration, wellbeing, inclusion, digital enablement, and evolving ways of working.
•    Balance aspirational design outcomes with cost, programme, operational, and risk considerations.

Retail & Client Environment Design 
•    Define and govern the design of retail branches and premium client environments to deliver a consistent, differentiated and hospitality-led client experience.
•    Embed service design and customer journey thinking into physical environments.
•    Partner with brand and business teams to align physical design with evolving propositions and service models.

Thought Leadership & Industry Benchmarking
•    Act as an internal design thought leader, shaping the future direction of workplace and retail environments.
•    Continuously benchmark against best-in-class global workplace, retail, and hospitality environments to inform strategy and standards.
•    Translate internal and external insights and trends into practical, scalable design principles for the portfolio.

Stakeholder Partnership & Influence
•    Co-own and evolve workplace and retail design guidelines with Head of Client & Employee Experience, Head of Projects, Head of Portfolio Planning, and key businesses including WRB and CIB.
•    Partner closely with CX, EX, CABM, HR, Technology, Operations, and business leaders to ensure end-to-end alignment.
•    Act as a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders on design quality, portfolio consistency, delivery risk, and long-term value.
•    Clearly articulate design intent, trade-offs, and value to support investment and governance decisions.

Design Assurance, Governance & Performance
•    Establish and maintain strong design governance, assurance, and approval processes.
•    Ensure compliance with regulatory, accessibility, safety, sustainability, and ESG requirements.
•    Manage design risk, particularly within live retail and client-facing environments.
•    Capture post-occupancy insights, performance data, and lessons learned to continuously refine standards and delivery models.
•    Ensure environments are adaptable, resilient, and future-ready.

Key stakeholders
•    CABM (Brand)
•    HR (Colleague Experience)
•    CIB (Client Suite and Trading floors)
•    WRB (PvB & Branch)
•    CRES GPO’s
•    CRES Client & Employee Experience 
•    CRES Capital Projects & Programmes
•    CRES Digital
•    CRES MT
•    CRES Supply Partners / Vendor
•    CRES CIO

Other Responsibilities
•    Embed Here for good and Group’s brand and values.
•    Perform other responsibilities assigned under Group, Country, Business or Functional policies and procedures.

Our Ideal Candidate

•    Preferably a bachelor’s degree in design or other business related disciplines preferred
•    15+ years’ experience leading workplace and/or retail design within large, complex, multi-site organisations.

•    Proven experience delivering design consistency at scale across global portfolios.
•    Strong experience leading design governance models and managing external design supply partners.
•    Demonstrated ability to act as a senior design authority while influencing executive stakeholders.
•    Deep understanding of design assurance, delivery models, and risk management.
•    Experience across both corporate workplace and retail/client-facing environments.
•    Experience evolving design delivery models, including digital or AI-enabled tools.
•    Familiarity with workplace analytics, experience metrics, and post-occupancy evaluation.
•    Sustainability and ESG design capabilities. 
•    Strategic, systems-oriented design leader with a strong focus on quality and consistency.
•    Confident, credible influencer who can challenge constructively and hold partners accountable.
•    Collaborative, pragmatic, and outcomes-focused.
•    High attention to detail with the ability to operate at both portfolio and project level.

Role Specific Technical Competencies

•    Influencing through expertise
•    Planning: Tactical, Strategic
•    Business Intelligence
•    Digital Fluent 
•    Risk Management 

About Standard Chartered

We're an international bank, nimble enough to act, big enough for impact. For more than 170 years, we've worked to make a positive difference for our clients, communities, and each other. We question the status quo, love a challenge and enjoy finding new opportunities to grow and do better than before. If you're looking for a career with purpose and you want to work for a bank making a difference, we want to hear from you. You can count on us to celebrate your unique talents and we can't wait to see the talents you can bring us.

Our purpose, to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, together with our brand promise, to be here for good are achieved by how we each live our valued behaviours. When you work with us, you'll see how we value difference and advocate inclusion.

Together we:

• Do the right thing and are assertive, challenge one another, and live with integrity, while putting the client at the heart of what we do
• Never settle, continuously striving to improve and innovate, keeping things simple and learning from doing well, and not so well
• Are better together, we can be ourselves, be inclusive, see more good in others, and work collectively to build for the long term

What we offer

In line with our Fair Pay Charter, we offer a competitive salary and benefits to support your mental, physical, financial and social wellbeing.

• Core bank funding for retirement savings, medical and life insurance, with flexible and voluntary benefits available in some locations.
• Time-off including annual leave, parental/maternity (20 weeks), sabbatical (12 months maximum) and volunteering leave (3 days), along with minimum global standards for annual and public holiday, which is combined to 30 days minimum.
• Flexible working options based around home and office locations, with flexible working patterns.
• Proactive wellbeing support through Unmind, a market-leading digital wellbeing platform, development courses for resilience and other human skills, global Employee Assistance Programme, sick leave, mental health first-aiders and all sorts of self-help toolkits
• A continuous learning culture to support your growth, with opportunities to reskill and upskill and access to physical, virtual and digital learning.
• Being part of an inclusive and values driven organisation, one that embraces and celebrates our unique diversity, across our teams, business functions and geographies - everyone feels respected and can realise their full potential.

Recruitment Assessments

Some of our roles use assessments to help us understand how suitable you are for the role you've applied to. If you are invited to take an assessment, this is great news. It means your application has progressed to an important stage of our recruitment process.

Visit our careers website www.sc.com/careers