As the Head of Workplace Experience, you will define and guide the organisation’s workplace strategy, ensuring that physical environments, services, and experiences directly support business objectives, organisational culture, and the employee value proposition (EVP). This is a unique opportunity for you to contribute to our progressive talent attraction and retention strategies by creating a workplace that enables performance, engagement, and connection. You will provide strategic and operational direction across workplace experience and facilities in the UK, ensuring all UK and international locations are safe, compliant, operationally efficient, and aligned to brand and business needs. In this role, you will lead a team of around 15 employees across 4 UK locations.
The ideal candidate will have experience working in a modern, agile workplace such as a Technology or Start-Up/Scale-Up environment.
Location: This is a London based role with 3-4 days per week spent onsite.
Closing date: Tuesday 23rd June, 5pm.
Role Scope & Key ResponsibilitiesWorkplace Strategy, Culture & EVP- Define and shape the enterprise-wide workplace experience strategy, aligning it with business goals, culture, and EVP.
- Create environments that support hybrid work, collaboration, and productivity.
- Continuously evolve the strategy using data and trends.
- Provide strategic direction for workplace experience
- Build and lead a high-performing, multi-disciplinary team, fostering a culture of service excellence and accountability.
- Collaborate with leadership to embed the workplace into the broader business strategy.
- Develop team capability and succession planning.
- Partner with international workplace experience colleagues to ensure consistency across sites
- Manage the end-to-end workplace operating model, ensuring consistent delivery of high-quality services across all locations (including reception, hospitality, facilities, and employee services).
- Partner with and manage external relationships with contractors and third parties.
- Ensure environments are safe, compliant, inclusive, and brand-aligned.
- Advance the optimisation of space utilisation and overall experience using data insights.
- Hold accountability for health, safety, risk, and compliance across all offices in the UK and overseas.
- Establish and maintain a robust control environment, managing and mitigating risks, overseeing risk registers, managing audit responses, and ensuring strict compliance with all relevant legislation and policies.
- Guide the strategic direction of the property portfolio, focusing on transformation, refurbishments, and space planning when needed.
- Set the vision and design intent for workplace environments.
- Oversee projects, ensuring execution to time, budget, and quality, while maintaining strong governance and risk management.
- Define and oversee the vendor strategy for workplace services, managing key supplier relationships, contracts, and performance.
- Promote commercial efficiency, successfully balancing financial responsibility with high quality.
- Manage workplace budgets, forecasting, and investment planning.
- Define how the workplace experience supports employee engagement, community, and culture.
- Oversee events and activations to enhance connection, positioning the workplace as a valued destination.
- Champion the workplace sustainability strategy, embedding responsible practices across operations.
- Ensure environments support employee wellbeing, accessibility, and inclusivity, aligning seamlessly with broader ESG goals.
RequirementsKnowledge, Skills, and Experience
To be successful in this role, you should bring:
- Deep expertise in workplace experience, facilities, and property management, with a proven track record of connecting strategy to organisational performance and EVP.
- Extensive knowledge of health & safety, risk management, and governance, within regulated and international environments.
- A strong understanding of workplace design, space planning, and managing refurbishment projects alongside strategic partners.
- Strong commercial awareness, including direct experience managing budgets, contracts, and supplier strategies at scale.
- Professional qualifications (such as NEBOSH, IOSH, or IWFM membership) and project management experience (e.g., PRINCE2) are highly desirable.
You are someone who:
- Demonstrates collaborative leadership, providing direction and development of your teams
- Builds strong executive-level relationships, successfully partnering with stakeholders and ensuring business alignment.
- Possesses strong commercial, operational, and organizational capability, deftly balancing experience, cost, and risk.
- Communicates with clarity and impact, guiding teams and stakeholders confidently through change.
- Is highly adaptable and forward-thinking, consistently using data to encourage continuous improvement.
- Maintains a thorough focus on governance, compliance, and operational excellence.
BenefitsWhy Join Starling?
Make an Impact: Work on projects that directly shape the future of banking and improve the financial lives of our customers. Starling is technology-led, and you'll have the freedom to accomplish your goals in innovative ways.
Culture of Excellence: Be part of a collaborative, empowered, and forward-thinking team. We encourage experimentation, ownership, and a relentless focus on "doing the right thing.”
Growth and Development: We are committed to your professional growth, offering opportunities to learn new technologies, take on new challenges, and own interesting things from day one.
A Bank That Cares: We're a Living Wage employer, committed to flexible working, and dedicated to creating a fair, open, and safe working environment with compassion and inclusion at its core.
Comprehensive Benefits: We offer a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package, including:
- Company-enhanced salary sacrifice pension scheme (7% employer contribution)
- Private Medical Insurance with Vitality including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton.
- 25 days holiday (plus take your public holiday allowance whenever works best for you)
- An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
- Life Insurance at 4x your salary.
- 16 hours of paid volunteering time a year.
- Ability to buy or sell annual leave.
- Generous family-friendly policies.
- Annual leave is increased with length of service, and you can choose to buy or sell up to five extra days off
- Incentivised refer a friend scheme
- Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
- Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasingOur Commitment to Equality
Starling Bank is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Starling Bank are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice. By submitting your application, you agree that Starling Bank will collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we will process, where we will process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.
Skills Required
- Deep expertise in workplace experience, facilities, and property management
- Extensive knowledge of health & safety, risk management, and governance in international environments
- Experience leading and developing multi-disciplinary workplace teams (c.15 people) across multiple sites
- Proven experience in workplace design, space planning, refurbishments and workplace transformation projects
- Commercial experience managing budgets, supplier contracts and vendor strategies at scale
- Experience working in a modern, agile workplace (technology or start-up/scale-up environments)
- Professional qualifications (e.g., NEBOSH, IOSH, IWFM) and project management experience (e.g., PRINCE2)
- Ability to partner with senior stakeholders and embed workplace strategy into business and EVP
What We Do
Hello, we’re Starling. Banking was broken – so we decided to fix it. The vision? Fast technology, fair service and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time. We built Britain’s first digital bank. One hard-won banking licence later, we set about giving people a new way to spend, save and manage their money (and take better care of the planet, too). We’re changing banking for good. Back then, we were obsessed with unravelling the knotty world of finance and solving people’s problems rather than selling them stuff. We still are. Since then, we’ve grown. A lot. Over three million accounts (and four account types!). A team of thousands. Headquartered in London with offices in Cardiff, Dublin, Manchester and Southampton. Five years voted Which? Recommended Provider and Britain's Best Banking Brand. Still zero branches. Our culture is open, inclusive and focused on solving real customer problems, with an emphasis on doing the right thing, even when it’s not always the easy thing. From our approach to working together and sustainability to how we build our products, our decisions need to make the world – and Starling – a better place to be. Everyone at Starling is essential to our mission, which is really quite simple: to solve our customer’s problems – and build the best bank in the world! And now we're providing Starling to other banks, via a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) proposition through our subsidiary Engine, using the proprietary technology platform that it uses to power our own bank.
