Lead UX Researcher
Job description
About Descript
Descript is an intuitive, AI-powered, collaborative, all-in-one video platform that makes it easy for anyone to create, edit, and share a video. Our goal is to make video editing easy enough for everyone on your team, and powerful enough for your video team.
We’re a product-led, customer-centric company that values craft, speed, and clear thinking. User research plays a central role — not just in understanding users, but in helping teams build better product intuition and ultimate better products for our customers.
About the role
We’re hiring a lead UX researcher to shape product decisions and how we practice user research across Descript.
You’ll operate as a senior IC, owning ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end, while also helping teams get closer to users through better tools, systems, and habits. This includes foundational and ethnographic research, improving how we synthesize and share insights, and enabling PMs and designers to run high-quality research themselves.
Descript serves a wide range of creators and enterprises with different workflows and goals. This role is key to helping us deeply understand those users, and ensure that understanding consistently drives product decisions.
If you’re excited about being part of a customer-obsessed culture, owning high-impact research and scaling its influence across a product org, we’d love to talk.
What you’ll do
Drive UX and product research
- Lead end-to-end UX research studies across large, ambiguous problem spaces
- Identify key unknowns and define the most appropriate research questions and methods to inform product decisions
- Conduct exploratory, evaluative, and longitudinal research (e.g. ethnography, usability, concept testing)
- Partner closely with PMs, designers, and product marketing, as well as data science, customer support, sales, and engineering, to ensure research is connected to both product decisions and real user feedback loops
Understand users and shape product direction
- Develop a deep understanding of our customers, their creative goals, and the evolving AI video landscape — and use those insights to guide the product roadmap
- Study how people create content, both inside and outside of using Descript — map and maintain a library of workflows, mental models, and friction points across users and use cases
- Synthesize findings into clear, actionable outputs that drive decisions (e.g. frameworks, highlight reels, journey maps)
Scale UX research across the organization
- Coach PMs and designers to plan and run their own research, and increase the number of teams able to run high-quality research independently
- Manage research operations systems, automating where possible, for participant recruitment, feedback management, and insight sharing
- Introduce new methods, tools, and rituals to improve how research is conducted, managed and shared
- Find creative and pragmatic ways to bring employees closer to the voice of the customer
- Host and manage programming for Insight Safari — a company-wide casual weekly gathering where we watch and discuss minimally edited user research footage together
Who you are
Experience
- 5+ years of UX research experience
- Experience working closely with product and design teams (not purely agency role)
- Experience building out a collaborative research practice within a product org, where you’ve used your expertise to mentor or train others in how to conduct high-quality user research
- Experience building out and maintaining research operation systems for managing study participation, feedback, research recordings, and the insights gleaned from that research
- Track record of concretely influencing product and strategic decisions
- Ability to scale a research practice using AI tools while maintaining the integrity of the research
Skills
- Strong across both quantitative and qualitative UX research methods: your toolbox contains various tools to get to the most actionable insights (e.g., facilitating 1:1 calls with customers, conducting unmoderated research studies, short & long-form surveys, mining sales & support data, engaging with online communities)
- Excellent synthesis and storytelling from complex info and data
- Strong product sense and ability to turn noisy insights to clear, actionable decisions
- Strong organizational skills, with a drive to ensure research data is well-catalogued for easy future access
- Ability to operate with high autonomy for a wide range of activities, from research coordination to facilitation and synthesis, while balancing rigor with speed
The base salary range for this role is $166,000-225,000/year. Final offer amounts will carefully consider multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise, and location, and they may vary from the amount above.
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About Descript
Descript is building a simple, intuitive, fully-powered editing tool for video and audio — an editing tool built for the age of AI. We are a team of 150 and the backing of some of the world's greatest investors (OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital).
Descript is the special company that's in possession of both product market fit and the raw materials (passionate user community, great product, large market) for growth, but is still early enough that each new employee has a measurable influence on the direction of the company.
Benefits include a generous healthcare package, 401k matching program, catered lunches, and flexible vacation time. Our headquarters are located in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA. We're hiring for a mix of remote roles and hybrid roles. For those who are remote, we have a handful of opportunities throughout the year for in person collaboration. For our hybrid roles, we're flexible, and you're an adult—we don't expect or mandate that you're in the office every day. We do believe there are valuable and serendipitous moments of discovery and collaboration that come from working together in person.
Descript is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.