Sr. Service Design Strategist

ECS is seeking a Sr. Service Design Strategist to work in a hybrid schedule in our Arlington, VA office.

 

Position Summary 

The Sr. Service Design Strategist will establish and maintain a Common Operating Picture (COP) that unifies the entire service lifecycle—ensuring governance enables speed and operational delivery aligns with design intent. This role serves as an integrator between strategy and execution, bridging Governance/Policy and Operations/Delivery. 

This position requires a blend of Human-Centered Design (HCD), IT Service Management (ITSM), and organizational change leadership, and will work across multiple branches to create shared understanding, standardized processes, and aligned performance measures.  

Key Responsibilities 

• Serve as the primary liaison between service design and service delivery branches. 

• Establish and maintain a Common Operating Picture (COP) as the single source of truth for leadership on service health, status, and performance. 

• Develop visual artifacts and frameworks that allow governance and operations teams to understand dependencies and collaborate effectively. 

• Facilitate seamless handoffs and collaborative workflows between teams. 

• Translate governance requirements into actionable operational workflows for delivery teams. 

• Feedback delivery constraints and operational realities to design teams to ensure policy is practical and implementable. 

• Coordinate service transition processes from design approval through operational deployment. 

• Facilitate alignment between performance, CX/UX, service management, and engineering teams. 

• Embed human-centered design principles throughout the full service lifecycle, including large-scale programs (e.g., CDM) and advocate for user experience considerations during service development phases. 

• Ensure customer engagement, training, and adoption perspectives are incorporated into engineering-focused initiatives. 

• Advocate for Service Design principles within the Operations teams (e.g., explaining why the design matters). 

• Advocate for DevOps/SRE principles within the Governance teams (e.g., explaining how modern delivery works). 

• Create performance measurement frameworks aligned with both governance and operational needs. 

• Establish governance structures that enable influence without direct authority. 

• Support restructuring of major services (e.g., CDM, CADS, CyberSentry) to align with a distributed service model and coordinate requirements gathering and architecture integration for new service implementations. 

• Build and maintain collaborative relationships across organizational boundaries where formal authority is limited. 

• Leverage existing leadership relationships to drive cross-functional initiatives. 

Qualifications

• US citizenship with an ability to obtain and maintain DHS Suitability (EOD)
• Strong understanding of IT Service Management (ITIL or similar) 

• Experience with Human-Centered Design and/or Service Design 

• Ability to translate between policy/governance and operational delivery 

• Strong facilitation and change management leadership skills 

• Proven experience working in complex enterprise environments where you had to align stakeholder groups with competing priorities 

• Experience working across matrixed organizations without direct authority 

• Ability to create visual models, frameworks, and operating constructs 

• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE concepts and modern service delivery models