Service Designer

About the Job:

The Sama Product & Engineering Team is building tools at the intersection of humans and AI/ML technology, enabling our teams to deliver secure, high-quality training data and validation for the technology teams driving humanity forward. We’re looking for an enthusiastic, compassionate, and thoughtful Service Designer who loves to take a human-centered approach in informing the design of services that result in a world-class delivery for our clients.

The Service Designer will be responsible for leading service design initiatives and conducting UX research with our East Africa teams. This role will support our operations and provide strategic input for new client project launches. If you have strong experience in UX research and knowledge in service design, we want to have you on board! 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Service Design responsibilities
• UXR for new product development
• Conduct user-focused studies across software product areas 
• Utilizing methods such as ethnographic/field research, concept testing, card sorting, tree testing, surveys, usability testing (remote and in-person) etc.
• Organize, schedule and document user studies performed out of EA
• Analyze, and communicate UX research results to key stakeholders 
• Generate tactical and strategic insights, as well as actionable recommendations from user research conducted.
• Initiate UX studies and usability studies to validate our new features
• Support with competitive intelligence/market research by collaborating with a PM for specific areas of research ad hoc

• Launch/GSD process investigation 
• Experimentation support & be a bridge from launch to scaling up projects, such as observation and detailed findings
• Collaborate with Product Operations, providing UXR and support
• Operations focus service design responsibilities:  
• Explore with other departments their ecosystem and challenges
• Ex: Support GSD on processes for external communications with clients
• Study off-platform initiatives 
• Ex: Annotation strategy for off-platform
• Lead the conducting of workshops and design thinking sessions to understand how we could enable our teams and processes 
• Ex: AI tool workshop with People org
• Ex: Supporting training team to improve how they upskill annotators in GenAI
• General Responsibilities
• With a reduced engineering team, and thus fewer feature release, proactively manage your time, with the support of your manager, to conduct Service Design activities
• Build strong collaborative relationships across the diverse teams within the company, including with GSD, engineering and product

Minimum Qualifications:

• Role located in Kenya to collaborate on the ground with Annotation teams
• Degree in user experience, human-centred design, human-computer interaction, sociology, psychology or a related field from a recognized university 
• At least 3 years of experience in UX research roles
• Excellent interpersonal abilities and communication skills
• Excellent written & spoken English, presentation skills
• Experience in usability testing and user testing
• Experience using Figma, Miro or Mural (or any other design tools to prototype and conduct workshops) 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with data analysis, sampling, and statistical analysis of survey or behavioral data
• Experience with survey and questionnaire design
• Experience running large scale user experience research 
• Experience running group workshops and design thinking sessions