Senior UX Researcher, YouTube Shopping Ads, AdsTube

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.

As a UX Researcher in YouTube Ads UX, you will lead strategic research across two core pillars: AdsTube and Shopping Ads. You will be instrumental in defining how we optimize the health and mechanics of the AdsTube ecosystem while simultaneously shaping the B2B tools, workflows, and platforms that enable advertisers to successfully scale their shoppable commerce experiences on YouTube.

In this role, you will be an investigator with a keen business sense. You don't just study users. You understand how businesses operate, how they make investment decisions, and how to measure the value of a product in a commercial ecosystem. You possess a mastery of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, a growth mindset, and a passion for aligning creator motivations with sustainable business goals.

This role will be working with team members from Zurich and Bangalore.

At YouTube, we believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. We work together to give everyone the power to share their story, explore what they love, and connect with one another in the process. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and boundless creativity, we move at the speed of culture with a shared goal to show people the world. We explore new ideas, solve real problems, and have fun — and we do it all together.

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

US: $159000 - $231000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Address assumptions and the status quo by identifying critical knowledge gaps in the Creator Ads ecosystem.
• Represent creator needs to UX, Product Management, and Engineering, ensuring product decisions account for the economic realities and growth goals of professional creators.
• Develop a comprehensive research roadmap that prioritizes the most urgent business questions, choosing the right mix of methods (e.g., ethnography, diary studies, or survey data) to deliver memorable, executive-ready insights.
• Use qualitative insights to navigate complex product trade-offs, balancing user friction with business viability in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment.
• Partner with data science and product marketing to triangulate "what" creators are doing with "why" they are doing it, turning research into a shared business advantage.

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.
  
• Experience with research methods (e.g., usability, studies, contextual inquires, 1:1 interviews, unmoderated research studies).
• Experience conducting user experience research with business or advertiser users.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Statistics, Psychology, Anthropology, or a related field.
• 5 years of experience conducting UX research on products and working with executive leadership (e.g., Director level and above).
  
• 3 years of experience managing projects, and working in a large, matrixed organization.
  
• Experience leading strategic research efforts and integrating user research into product designs and design practices.
• Experience engaging with quantitative stakeholders and understanding quantitative findings and materials.

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