Staff UX Qualitative Researcher, Trust UX

At Google, we "Focus on the user and all else will follow." As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), you make this possible. You will join our multi-disciplinary UX team, collaborating with Engineering and Product Management, to gather insights and create industry-leading products.

You’ll play a critical role in helping your team understand user needs and will drive impact at all stages of product development, ensuring products are useful, usable, and helpful. You will explore user behaviors and motivations by conducting primary research, including: field studies, interviews, diary studies, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and logs analysis. You will also grow within a supportive UXR community offering mentorship, regular meetups, and exclusive internal tools.

The Trust UX team is responsible for building durable, cross-Google solutions that enable products to easily provide coherent, compliant, and age-appropriate experiences that empower users to make meaningful and informed choices about their data.

In close collaboration with a UX design partner, you will own and drive foundational and exploratory research for consent, transparency, and age-assurance experiences. You will explore emerging trends and capabilities, develop opinionated perspectives on key topics, and operate as a thought-partner to leadership, product management, and executive UXers.

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.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $188000 - $275000 (USD) + 20% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Lead goal and strategy discussions by analyzing, consolidating, or synthesizing what is known about user, product, regulatory, and business needs.
• Understand and incorporate complex technical and business requirements into research, using qualitative insights to navigate complex product trade-offs, and balancing user needs with business objectives in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.
• Actively challenge assumptions and the status quo by identifying critical knowledge gaps in the consent, transparency, and controls ecosystem, especially those relating to AI and age assurance.
• Conduct independent research on future-facing, conceptual and design-forward topics and bring research-driven insights and recommendations to product strategy discussions.
• Collaborate closely with a design partner to develop a comprehensive research and design strategy and innovative approaches to forward-looking solutions, prioritizing the most urgent business questions, and deliver memorable, executive-ready insights.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 8 years of experience in an applied research setting, or similar.
• 8 years of experience in primary research and analytics, specifically working with research techniques (e.g., qualitative and quantitative).

Preferred qualifications:

• 10 years of experience conducting UX research on products.
• 7 years of experience working with executive leadership (e.g., Director level and above).
• 5 years of experience managing projects, and working in a large, matrixed organization.

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: New York, NY, USA; San Jose, CA, USA.