Senior/Staff/Principal Service Designer (CMS)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. 

We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. 

The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, service designers tie together human, digital, and physical interactions to create or change how government organizations operate in order to create or improve a service. Service designers are expected to understand the problem and organizational landscape, identify opportunities, and iteratively develop services and solutions.

As a Service Designer at Skylight, you won’t just be mapping journeys—you’ll be building the engines that power them. We are partnering with CMS and state Medicaid agencies to implement critical new community engagement requirements, ensuring eligible people stay covered. This is a high-stakes, delivery-focused role where your work lives at the intersection of policy, procedure, and production systems, not slide decks. You will operate at the "policy–tech boundary," translating federal mandates into functional APIs, data integrations, and streamlined internal workflows. Navigating the complexities of state bureaucracies and legacy systems, you'll use human-centered, agile methods to solve thorny eligibility problems and ship working software in rapid, iterative sprints. If you are a designer who loves to get their hands dirty with data, logic, and real-world implementation under tight deadlines, we want to talk.

What you’ll do

• Lead strategy and planning to define service design engagements
• Iteratively conduct the core of activities of service design — research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation — as part of a multidisciplinary, lean-agile team 
• Understand people and their behavior in relation to a service through research planning (e.g., what research methods to use), data collection (e.g., contextual inquiry), then synthesize research data through visualization and analysis (e.g., service blueprints)
• Generate ideas related to addressing the problem space through ideation planning, idea generation (e.g., brainwriting), and idea selection (e.g., decision matrix)
• Explore, evaluate, and communicate how people might experience or behave in future service situations through prototyping (commonly requires paper or clickable prototypes but may need other ways to validate user interactions and experiences)
• Implement changes to the components of a service — organizational, operational, human, technological, and physical — through activities such as process reengineering, software development, and change management
• Maintain organized, well-written documentation throughout the process

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Bias towards delivery and action
• Can take a systems thinking approach to changing how elements of an organization interact and influence one another
• Ability to plan, synthesize, and present research
• Ability to identify the best opportunities for service improvement through ideation and experimentation activities
• Know how to align policies, technology, infrastructures, and systems to drive meaningful outcomes for the business and users
• Ability to lead collaborative research and design activities, influence others, and build consensus
• Comfort working with technical and data workflows and systems, with enough fluency to collaborate effectively with engineering and data teams
• Ability to flex into product design activities (e.g., prototyping, interaction design, and collaborating closely with product and engineering teams to support delivery)
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
• Passionate about creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience collaborating with state government partners
• Experience with Medicaid, Medicare, or healthcare programs
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment

Don’t meet every qualification but think you can do the job? We’d still love to hear from you. If you’re excited about the role, apply. We c