Senior UX Researcher, Core Experience

At Google, we follow a simple but vital premise: "Focus on the user and all else will follow." User Experience Researchers (UXRs) make this possible.

Google User Experience (UX) is made up of multi-disciplinary teams of UX Designers, Researchers, Writers, Content Strategists, Program Managers, and Engineers: we care deeply about the people who use our products. The UX team plays an integral part in gathering insights about the needs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors of people who use our products to inspire and inform design. We collaborate closely with each other and with engineering and product management to create industry-leading products that deliver value for the people who use them, and for Google’s businesses.

As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), you’ll help your team of UXers, product managers, and engineers understand user needs. You’ll work with stakeholders across functions and levels and have impact at all stages of product development. You’ll play a critical role in creating useful, usable, and delightful products. You’ll explore user behaviors and motivations by conducting primary research such as field studies, interviews, diary studies, participatory workshops, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and logs analysis.

The UXR community at Google is unique and will help you do your best work. You’ll have the opportunity to work with and learn from UXRs across Google through regular meetups, mentor programs, and access to internal research tools.

In this role, you will directly shape the sign-in experiences for users. You'll be part of a collaborative and supportive team that thrives on managing research questions together.

The Core team builds the technical foundation behind Google’s flagship products. We are owners and advocates for the underlying design elements, developer platforms, product components, and infrastructure at Google. These are the essential building blocks for excellent, safe, and coherent experiences for our users and drive the pace of innovation for every developer. We look across Google’s products to build central solutions, break down technical barriers and strengthen existing systems. As the Core team, we have a mandate and a unique opportunity to impact important technical decisions across the company.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $151,000-$222,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Drive research programs to identify high-value opportunities for the team and cross-functional partners while managing priorities and high-profile initiatives.
• Partner with design, product, data science, and engineering leaders to drive product strategy and ensure product excellence through strategic and tactical research.
• Demonstrate problem-framing, build upon existing knowledge, integrate appropriate quantitative and qualitative methods, and deliver research execution and communication of insights.
• Facilitate healthy team dynamics in a fast-paced environment, build cross-functional relationships, and increase adoption of strategic/tactical research insights at the team, product, and organizational level.
• Own and execute research surveys while serving as a methodology consultant for product experiments to ensure all data is grounded in statistical principles.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 6 years of experience of experience in an applied research setting (e.g., product or academic), or similar.
  
• 2 years of work experience in survey research, with experience in survey sampling, question design, and analysis best practices.
• Experience with research methods (e.g., usability, studies, contextual inquires, 1:1 interviews, unmoderated research studies).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in human-computer interaction, cognitive science, statistics, psychology, anthropology, or a related field.
• Experience with usability testing, contextual inquiry, diary study, RITE, and other methods.
• Experience with product research to help teams identify new opportunities to pursue and guide how best to complete them with users.
• Experience understanding and assessing differences across user groups (e.g., new/existing users, multiple markets, etc.).
• Ability to lead foundational work (e.g., ethnography, interviews, longitudinal studies) and validate insights through strategic survey design and statistical analysis (e.g., SQL, SPSS, or R).