Staff Conversation Designer, OVO
£75-90k
+ Eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%
Senior and Expert level
London
More information about location
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
Be an early applicant
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
1001+ employees
B2CEnergySustainability
Be an early applicant
£75-90k
+ Eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%
Senior and Expert level
London
More information about location
1001+ employees
B2CEnergySustainability
Company mission
To lower carbon emissions to zero by 2035, helping our customers reduce theirs at the same time - we call this Plan Zero.
Role
Who you are
- Top 3 qualities for this role: Problem-solver, Collaborative, Visionary
- Think beyond copy and flows and take a systems-level view of how AI experiences are designed and delivered
- Have hands-on experience designing for chatbots, voice assistants or intelligent agents, with a strong portfolio to back it up
- Understand the capabilities and limitations of LLMs and can design within those constraints
- Care deeply about the user and use research, performance data and feedback to guide your decisions
- Can switch between high-level thinking and fine-tuned craft, and know when to zoom in or out
- Communicate well with both technical and non-technical teams and are comfortable challenging assumptions
- Are curious, proactive and comfortable working in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
- Have a working knowledge of how LLMs are deployed in production, including prompt orchestration, agent behaviour and data retrieval methods
What the job involves
- This role in 3 words: Innovative, Strategic, Impactful
- Team: XD
- We’re looking for a Staff Conversation Designer to lead the design of intelligent, helpful and intuitive experiences across OVO’s digital and human-assisted channels
- This is not a typical content design role. You’ll be shaping how our customers interact with AI-powered systems across the business, from LLM assistants to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic workflows
- You’ll design systems that interpret, respond and act intelligently, helping customers manage their energy with clarity, confidence and less effort
- Strategic Design and Ownership
- Lead the design of complex conversational flows across OVO’s app, website and advisor tools
- Set design direction for conversational AI across multiple teams or products, ensuring coherence, consistency and scalability
- Identify where conversational AI can make a real difference to the user experience and product outcomes
- Influence product direction and help shape how and where AI is introduced to drive the most value
- Take full responsibility for the accuracy, usefulness and human-centred nature of AI outputs, especially those powered by generative AI
- Act as the design sponsor on high-impact AI initiatives across the business, partnering with leadership to define the vision, principles and roadmap for AI at OVO
- Expert Craft and Implementation
- Design natural, efficient and context-aware interactions for AI assistants, including multi-turn dialogue, tone and logic that support intent recognition, context retention and fallback handling
- Write, structure and optimise LLM prompts for clarity, accuracy and performance, while maintaining a consistent brand voice
- Define and implement interaction patterns for both stateless and stateful dialogue systems
- Prototype, test and iterate conversational experiences to improve usability and system performance, using tools like Voiceflow, Rasa, LangChain or custom orchestration frameworks
- Contribute to the development of prompt libraries, vector-based memory systems and safety guardrails to improve scalability and control
- Lead prompt engineering and optimisation for LLMs and agent-based systems, including the design of function-calling flows and structured output handling
- Collaboration and Leadership
- Work closely with designers, engineers, product managers and data scientists to shape and ship great conversational experiences
- Facilitate workshops and design sprints to drive ideas and alignment across teams
- Define and document best practices, playbooks or training to support adoption of conversational AI patterns and systems
- Coach and mentor others, raising the bar for conversation design and AI thinking across the team
- Clearly explain design decisions and technical concepts to a wide range of audiences
- Help build confidence in AI within the business by demonstrating its value and ensuring it is designed responsibly
- Tools and Methodologies
- Confident using tools like Figma, Miro and conversational design platforms, alongside AI development environments such as the Gemini API, Postman and prompt engineering sandboxes
- Experienced in evaluating AI interactions using metrics such as fallback rate, hallucination rate, token usage, response latency and user satisfaction
- Work closely with ML engineers and backend developers to define integration points, orchestrate AI behaviours and ensure system performance
- Understand the constraints of LLMs, including context windows, API limitations and prompt token budgets
- Apply an agile, iterative approach, working in short cycles to learn and ship quickly
- Use both AI performance data and qualitative insights to continuously refine and optimise interactions
- Community of Practice:
- Contribute to the appropriate Community of Practice (CoP) by leading discussions, sharing practices, and offering firsthand experience to the wider community
- Create content and individually contribute to the stated successful outcomes for this CoP
- Help shape how conversation design evolves as a discipline within OVO and beyond
Our take
On average, home energy represents 26% of our carbon footprint. Ovo Energy wants to bring this to zero by providing cheaper, greener and simpler energy to customers. It's analysing meter data to deliver easy, personalised actions, turning electric vehicles into power stations with clever chargers, and building energy-efficient heaters. For households, it's offering is organised into four different energy plans, that include interest rewards on energy credit balance.
In 2020, OVO completed the acquisition of SSE Energy Services' retail arm for £500 million, meaning that the challenger brand now has around 4 million customers in the UK.
While helping Ovo members halve their carbon footprints, the company is also working towards becoming a net zero carbon business by 2035. The challenges ahead for the company include encouraging consumer behaviour change, shifting towards subscription models for home energy use.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Top investors
Company
Employee endorsements
Inspiring mission
"The mission to provide Green energy to all customers, and to enable all our customers to start on a journey towards zero carbon living is written in..."
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jul 2023
$270.9m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Feb 2019
$270.9m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $583.8m
Company benefits
- On-target bonus up to 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal
- Flex Pay: 9% on top of your salary - 4% of this is auto enrolled into your pension, and the remaining 5% is yours to do what you like with. You can use this to buy from our extensive range of flexible benefits, including our green benefits which we've put at the heart of our offering, add to your pension or even take it as cash
- 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays)
- For your health: With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more
- For your wellbeing: With gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more
- For your lifestyle: With extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations
- For your home: Get up to £400 towards any OVO Energy plan, plus great discounts on solar, smart thermostats and EV chargers
- For your commute: Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans
- For your belonging: To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other’s experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It's up to you
Leadership
David Buttress
(CEO)CEO of OVO, the UK’s 3rd largest energy supplier. Joined in May 2024.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at OVO
Alessandro Storer (Head of Inclusion & Belonging )
- We run inclusive training and unconscious bias workshops for employees and interviewers
- We provide mental health support, through different networks, having mental health first aiders within the business and running initiatives like our "wellbeing Wednesdays" to promote this.
- We have dedicated Early Years programmes with a focus on underrepresented groups, offering different training opportunities within the business.
- We invest in tools, like Textio, and focused I&D job boards to help us reduce bias in our job postings and recruitment activity.
- Commitment in improving diversity across our Tech Teams and working with companies to improve the tech ecosystem as a whole, specifically have committed to at least 30% Women in Tech at OVO by 2026
- We've signed up to numerous charters, like the Tech Talent Charter, Race at Work Charter and Trans in the City, to show our continuing commitment to improving I&D within OVO and the wider community
- Within OVO we have multiple belonging networks and communities set up, to offer support and forums for everybody
- Read more about our commitments to improving Diversity & Inclusion at OVO in our linked belonging report
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