Lead UX Researcher

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in India.

📋 Description

• Oversee comprehensive research initiatives throughout the discovery, validation, and usability phases — from defining the brief to presenting findings to stakeholders.

• Design and conduct various studies utilizing methods such as stakeholder interviews, discovery sessions, usability tests, diary studies, and co-creation workshops.

• Integrate complex insights into strategic deliverables: journey maps, service blueprints, opportunity frameworks, and research reports tailored to client contexts.

• Develop research strategies for AI-driven products — assessing trust calibration, user mental models, and failure-mode identification — employing simulation-based stimuli as appropriate.

• Facilitate pre-research alignment sessions to uncover stakeholder assumptions and address scope gaps prior to fieldwork initiation.

• Act as the research advocate in client-facing discussions; interpret findings for product owners, engineering leads, and program managers.

• Proactively discover new research opportunities within ongoing projects and advocate for scope enhancements or follow-up phases.

• Guide junior researchers and UX designers in research methodologies through integrated coaching on active projects.

• Manage ResearchOps infrastructure: exploratory and evaluative research frameworks, templates, and tools that can be scaled across the organization.

• Offer insights on emerging research methods, tools, and evaluation strategies for AI products.

• Contribute to Koru's research practice model — determining how we staff engagements, define research phases, and articulate research value to clients.

⛳️ Requirements

• 7–11 years of practical UX research experience, including a minimum of 3 years in a leadership or senior role.

• Direct experience in conducting research for enterprise or B2B products — including SaaS, healthcare, automation, finance, or intricate internal tools.

• Strong stakeholder management skills: capable of facilitating alignment sessions, refining ambiguous briefs, and establishing trust with senior stakeholders on the client side.

• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguous, open-ended briefs in a consultancy or agency setting — able to structure unclear aspects and initiate action.

• Experience in developing research operations infrastructure — creating templates, frameworks, or process enhancements that have benefited the team as a whole, rather than just individual practices.

• Comfortable collaborating with US-based users and stakeholders, adapting communication and recruitment strategies to accommodate cross-timezone challenges.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills — producing clear reports, delivering confident presentations, and facilitating discussions in a mixed-stakeholder environment.

🏝️ Benefits

• Genuine research leadership opportunities — you'll shape our research approach rather than merely executing it.

• Engage with complex enterprise products across healthcare, automation, and AI — areas where research significantly influences product development.

• Continuous learning opportunities: access to LinkedIn Learning, professional training, and participation in conferences.

• Flexible working hours with options for remote work.

• A collaborative culture that values research as a strategic function, not simply as a service delivery.