Staff User Researcher

What You'll Do

• Overall Impact
• You are trusted to lead research in areas that are ambiguous, risky, or critical to product success. Your proactive impact spans beyond individual studies to shaping how product teams think, plan, and make decisions.
• Define and drive research strategy for a key strategic vertical, aligning insight work to customer problems and outcomes inline with our business strategy. Influence how tripods (Product, Design, and Engineering) operate by embedding evidence and usability into discovery, delivery, and iteration.
• Operationalize research practices and mentor others across the org on research-informed decision-making and human-centered innovation
• Raise the visibility bar across the company on how we understand customers and their evolving pain points
• Act as a multiplier: operating with little guidance to enable better, faster decisions across the product lifecycle, and championing a qualitative and quantitative approach.
• You are seen as a trusted strategic partner and influence investment decisions and long-term planning.
• Your work leads to measurable improvements in product-market fit, user satisfaction, and adoption. Provide insight that drives measurable revenue growth and enables teams to deliver with clarity and confidence against our product visionAnticipates systemic challenges and proactively aligns research with evolving business models, resource limitations, and competitive pressures.
• Research Leadership & Strategic Insight
• Drive generative and foundational research efforts that shape product vision and inform early-stage betsDevelop and socialize long-range research roadmaps that anticipate business evolution and customer trajectory, in partnership with product, design, and engineering leadsProactively identify gaps in understanding and design studies that go beyond validation toward discovery, driving long-range insight strategies.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear research questions and methodologiesLeverage mixed methods to triangulate insights, from in-depth qualitative to survey-based quant or usage analytics
• Research Execution
• Own and execute research prioritization, high-quality research studies independently or in collaboration with others, and sequencing in order to ensure alignment with business rhythms, engineering constraints, and product delivery timelines
• Synthesize findings into clear, persuasive narratives that influence decision-making at multiple levels
• Creates scalable frameworks and repeatable mechanisms (e.g., journey maps, templates, ops integrations) that elevate team understanding and increase throughput and decision velocity.
• Balance speed and rigor — knowing when to go deep, and when to move fast
• Collaboration
• Act as a strategic thought partner to design, product, and engineering leadership
• Models continuous growth through active learning and industry engagement (talks, publications, communities); develops others and helps advance standards across the field.
• Drive and influence prioritization through insight-backed framing of customer problems and opportunitiesFacilitate workshops and co-creation sessions to align teams on research findings and implicationsPartner with data science, support, and analytics teams to paint a holistic view of the user experience
• Team Citizenship
• Mentor junior and mid-level researchers; provide feedback, support, and strategic guidanceContribute to the evolution of our research ops, tooling, and education effortsBe a multiplier for both researchers and non-researchers by coaching cross-functional partners (including tripods) to integrate research fluency and evidence-guided decision-making into their daily practice.
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and team culture-building efforts

What You Should Have

• Expert and sought-out authority in human-centered strategy; translates market, customer, and technology shifts into actionable research direction.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in HCI, Psychology, Human Factors, Sociology, or related field12+ years of experience in UX research, with a proven track record of driving strategic impact in complex product spaces
• Familiarity with tools such as UserTesting, User Interviews, Maze, Qualtrics, or Looker
• Expert in qualitative and quantitative research methods, and when/how to apply them
• Strong communicator with the ability to distill complexity and advocate for users with clarity and confidence
• Experience working in SaaS or tech-focused environments with agile product teams
• Deeply collaborative and comfortable in cross-functional decision-making environments
• Strategic mindset with an ability to connect the dots between insights, opportunity, and outcomes
• Resilient, thoughtful, and highly self-motivated

Nice To Haves

• Experience mentoring researchers or building research functions
• Background working with AI-driven or complex system products
• Familiarity with research ops practices and tools