Senior UX Researcher, YouTube

About the job

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 role of UX Research is evolving. As a Senior Researcher, you will see your role not just as a 'doer of primary research', but as a strategic partner, an orchestrator of insights, and a creator of solutions. In this role, you’ll use your methodological skills to address the high-stakes problems that only a specialist can solve - while using new tools and adjacent skills to move up the value chain and make change happen.

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 - $230000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Learn more about

benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Own the research agenda for a complex problem space - directing tactical work across Rapid Research, vendors, and teammates, while saving your bandwidth for high-uncertainty strategic questions.
• Partner with leadership to look beyond features and  bring a clear point of view to decisions, and challenge proposed solutions that won't serve users.
• Partner with Data Science, Engineers, and fellow researchers to weave qual, quant, and prior insights into unified narratives - and ensure new products are instrumented to measure what matters.
• Use AI tools to strip friction from synthesis and knowledge sharing, while helping shape new human-AI experiences and anticipating emerging risks.
• Build trusted cross-functional partnerships, design immersions that bring teammates closer to users, mentor peers, and help evolve UXR practice across Google.

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).

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Statistics, Psychology, Anthropology, or 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 of the content economy or direct messaging.
• Experience working in international teams and across timezones.