Domain Principal - Digital Design Coherence

• Provide design leadership across Inland Revenue’s customer-facing digital services
• Permanent opportunity
• Help shape the standards and practices that guide myIR and Gateway Services

The Opportunity | Ara Whiwhi Mahi  

Inland Revenue’s digital services play a critical role in how New Zealanders meet their tax and social policy obligations. Our online channels support high-volume customer interactions and need to remain consistent, accessible, usable and sustainable as customer needs, technology and legislation change.

We are looking for an experienced practice leader to provide system-level design stewardship across myIR and Gateway Services. These are established services that continue to evolve through major initiatives, legislative change and ongoing improvement. Individual changes need to meet immediate delivery needs while also contributing to a coherent and sustainable digital service landscape.

This is a senior specialist role for someone who can look beyond an individual project or product and understand how design decisions interact and accumulate across services and customer journeys. You will establish and evolve the standards, patterns and guardrails that guide design decisions, while helping teams balance customer needs, accessibility, business requirements, technology constraints and long-term maintainability.

You will work closely with digital leaders, delivery teams and specialists to embed design quality throughout planning, design and delivery. You will provide clear direction on complex design matters, bring people together to resolve issues that extend across services or teams, and lead the continuous improvement of design quality and capability.

This role may be based anywhere in New Zealand where IR has an office.

In this role, you will:

• Lead design coherence across our digital channels: You will own and champion the approach to design coherence across myIR, Gateway Services and our wider digital design responsibilities.
• Establish design standards and practices: You will develop, maintain and evolve the principles, patterns, standards and guardrails that help teams make consistent and well-informed design decisions.
• Provide system-level design stewardship: You will look beyond individual initiatives and consider how decisions interact and accumulate across services, customer journeys and releases.
• Embed design integrity: You will work with multidisciplinary delivery teams and decision-making forums to ensure design quality is considered early and throughout the lifecycle of work.
• Resolve complex design issues: You will identify fragmentation, design debt and recurring quality issues that extend across services or teams. You will bring the right people together, clarify the problem and lead practical work to address its underlying causes.
• Provide authoritative advice: You will advise specialists, delivery teams, governance groups and senior leaders on complex design matters, communicating implications and trade-offs clearly.
• Build design capability: You will coach and support people across the Digital domain to understand and apply design standards confidently and consistently.

We are looking for someone with significant digital design experience and the ability to provide practice leadership across a complex service environment.

About you | Mōu  

You will bring:

• Experience owning and championing design coherence across a complex digital channel, platform, product portfolio or service landscape.
• Experience providing system-level design stewardship beyond a single project, product or customer journey.
• Demonstrated ability to establish and embed design standards, patterns, guardrails or assurance approaches within delivery and governance.
• Experience leading the continuous improvement of design quality and practice maturity.
• Strong judgement in balancing customer needs, accessibility, business outcomes, technology constraints, risk and long-term maintainability.
• The ability to understand and manage the cumulative impact of design decisions across multiple services and teams.
• The ability to provide credible, well-informed advice to senior leaders, governance forums and multidisciplinary delivery teams.
• Strong relationship management and influencing capability, including where you do not hold formal authority.
• The ability to bring people together to resolve complex design issues and reach practical, well-informed decisions.
• The ability to coach others, build shared capability and establish practices that continue to work without your direct involvement.
• Motivation to contribute to public services that affect people and businesses across Aotearoa New Zealand.

You may have developed this experience through service design, product design, design systems, platform design, design governance or digital transformation. You do not need to have worked in tax before, but you will need to be comfortable operating in a large and complex environment where design decisions affect customers, business operations and public outcomes.

This is not primarily a hands-on interface design role. We are looking for someone who can turn deep design expertise into practical standards, stronger decisions and sustained improvements across an established digital service landscape.

If this sounds like the kind of design leadership challenge you want to contribute to, we’re keen to hear from you.

Apply here | Tono mai

Please apply online with your CV and supporting information, clearly outlining your experience against the requirements for this role.

For more information about the role please contact [email protected] 

We recognise that AI tools can support application preparation.  Just make sure your responses reflect your own experience—we’re keen to get to know the real you and what you can bring to the role.  

Like you, we pride ourselves on our friendly and informative communication. If you need accessibility assistance at any point in the application process or would like to know more about what accessibility and inclusion means to us, please call 0800 775 247 to leave a message and a member of the team will be in touch. 

Applications close 1.00pm, Tuesday 11 August 2026