Lead Creative Technologist

Job description

Who We Are At Kyndryl, we run and reimagine the mission-critical technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. We are at the heart of progress; with proven expertise and a continuous flow of AI-powered insight, enabling smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge. For our people—Kyndryls—that means doing purposeful work that powers human progress. Join us and experience a flexible, supportive environment where your well-being is prioritized and your potential can thrive. The Role Are you a strategist who makes, or a maker who thinks strategically? Can you turn an ambiguous enterprise challenge into a shared point of view, a testable experience, and evidence for the next decision? If you believe the best AI-enabled services are designed with clients and their users - not simply delivered to them - you will feel at home in the AI Innovation Lab with Kyndryl Vital. Kyndryl Vital is a global network of designers, engineers, researchers, writers, and strategists helping organizations make sense of complexity and create experiences that are useful, responsible, and buildable. We combine behavioral insight, business understanding, and deep technology expertise so ideas can move beyond aspiration into delivery, adoption, and measurable value. Based in Madrid and serving clients across Europe, the AI Innovation Lab is part studio, part workshop, and part proving ground. Client sponsors, frontline users, Kyndryl designers, and technologists work together in short, focused cycles: framing a challenge, making possibilities tangible, testing prototypes, and deciding what to stop, iterate, pilot, or scale. We favor demos over decks and evidence over opinion. The opportunity We are hiring two to three Creative Technologists who can bridge human-centered design, business strategy, and emerging technology. This is a shared role family, not a search for identical candidates. Everyone should be comfortable moving from ambiguity to a testable artifact, but each person will bring greater depth in one of two complementary profiles. Strategic / Conceptual profile: stronger in problem framing, systems thinking, co-design, service and conversational experience, synthesis, and helping senior stakeholders make decisions through tangible artifacts. Practical / Technical profile: stronger in rapid functional prototyping, low-code and AI platforms, APIs, data integration, agentic patterns, and turning workshop outputs into working demonstrations. We do not expect every candidate to be equally deep in both profiles. We do expect curiosity across the full cycle, generosity in multidisciplinary teams, and the ability to make their thinking visible. Together, the Lab team should be able to frame, facilitate, build, test, and hand off. What you will do Shape the right challenge. Work with sponsors and users to locate the real decision inside a broad brief, understand the current system, and define the behavior, outcome, or learning the engagement should create. Design and facilitate co-creation. Create participatory sessions for executives, subject-matter experts, frontline users, designers, and engineers. Enable people with different levels of confidence and authority to contribute meaningfully. Make ideas tangible early. Use sketches, scenarios, conversation flows, simulations, low-code tools, or working software to give participants something concrete to react to and improve. Prototype with people. Build during and between sessions, incorporating feedback while the problem and trade-offs are still visible. Choose fidelity deliberately: each artifact should answer a question or unlock a decision. Design human-agent collaboration. Create clear patterns for autonomy, approvals, escalation, uncertainty, exceptions, rollback, and human override so users remain informed and in control. Test value and feasibility together. Explore desirability, business value, data readiness, integration, security, operational impact, cost, and maintainability before recommending a pilot. Turn learning into direction. Synthesize observations and prototype evidence into opportunity areas, principles, requirements, success measures, and a credible stop / iterate / pilot / scale recommendation. Create a clean path to delivery. Partner with FDEs, architects, security, data, Consult Partners and delivery leads so validated concepts have an owner, documented assumptions, and an appropriate route forward. Help build the Lab as a capability. Contribute reusable methods, starter environments, component libraries, evaluation sets, showcases, and decision rituals so every engagement starts faster and leaves knowledge behind. Who You Are Required Technical and Professional Expertise. What you bring. Human-centered and systemic thinking. You apply human-centered design and design thinking techniques at a strategic level, connecting user behavior and lived experience with business goals, operating models, incentives, technology constraints, and wider organizational consequences. Strategy through making. You use artifacts and experiments to reduce ambiguity, surface assumptions, and improve decisions rather than treating prototyping as a final presentation step. Participatory facilitation. You can prepare and lead executive workshops and hands-on making sessions, read the room, rebalance participation, and adapt the plan without losing the intended outcome. Cross-disciplinary fluency. You collaborate credibly with Consult, design, business, FDEs, data, architecture, security, and client teams without pretending to be the deepest expert in every discipline. AI experience literacy. You understand how generative and agentic systems behave, where they fail, and how to design for uncertainty, trust, feedback, and appropriate human control. Responsible experimentation. You make data use, model limitations, permissions, safety, auditability, and ethical trade-offs explicit, proportionate to the risk and maturity of the prototype. Evidence-led storytelling. You communicate a compelling possibility while distinguishing what has been observed, assumed, simulated, validated, and still needs to be learned. Enterprise pragmatism. You move quickly while respecting governance, security, accessibility, and the realities of complex organizations. Service Design. Preferred Professional and Technical Expertise: 1) Creative Technologist – AI Experience Prototype Rapid creation of functional prototypes using low-code platforms, AI-assisted development, or code. Hands-on experience with generative AI, prompt and context design, tool use, structured outputs, and agentic workflows. Working knowledge of RAG, APIs, data integration, identity, permissions, and enterprise cloud patterns. Ability to create credible web or conversational interfaces and represent loading, uncertainty, error, and edge cases. Practical evaluation of response quality, groundedness, safety, latency, reliability, and cost. Clear documentation of what is functional, simulated, reusable, and required for a production implementation. 2) Creative Technologist – AI Strategy Advanced problem framing, systems thinking, design research, or experience strategy. Design of co-creation formats that move groups from divergent perspectives to shared choices. Synthesis of qualitative evidence into insights, hypotheses, principles, opportunity areas, and roadmaps. Conversational and agentic experience design, including roles, boundaries, handoffs, and exception journeys. Executive communication and the ability to challenge solution-first thinking constructively. Enough prototyping fluency to make ideas testable using tools such as Figma, Miro, or low-code platforms. Tools and technologies You do not need experience with every product below. We are interested in transferable capability and evidence of learning quickly. The Lab's working environment is expected to include: Co-creation and experience design: Figma, FigJam,