Senior UX Researcher, Rider Experience

About the position Waymo is an autonomous driving technology company with the mission to be the world's most trusted driver. Since its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, Waymo has focused on building the Waymo Driver—The World's Most Experienced Driver™—to improve access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes. The Waymo Driver powers Waymo’s fully autonomous ride-hail service and can also be applied to a range of vehicle platforms and product use cases. The Waymo Driver has provided over ten million rider-only trips, enabled by its experience autonomously driving over 100 million miles on public roads and tens of billions in simulation across 15+ U.S. states. Design at Waymo is about the total experience—not just how the product looks, but how it works, how it feels, and how we make our new technology accessible, approachable, and useful for everyone. We design the intuitive, delightful experience for our riders, and we also build the powerful, complex tools used by our fleet operations teams and the engineers who build the Waymo Driver. We are a highly multidisciplinary team of UX Designers, User and Market Researchers, UX Engineers, Content Designers, Industrial Designers, CAD Designers, Studio Engineers, and Technical Artists. We dig deep to understand the attitudes, emotions, and behaviors of all our users. This understanding serves as the foundation for everything we create. This role follows a hybrid work schedule and you will report to a Manager of Product & Customer Research.

Responsibilities

• Take complex, open-ended problems, clarify the scope, create a rigorous research plan, and execute with timely product impact
• Initiate and lead research efforts end-to-end, taking full accountability for a product area's strategic research roadmap and engaging key stakeholder partners along the way
• Apply comprehensive mixed methods UX research expertise to generate authoritative insights that proactively identify opportunities for product strategy evolution and influence product decisions
• Act as a strong strategic partner to design, product management, and engineering leaders, clearly articulating a research point of view and coordinating efforts across multiple teams
• Set the bar for high-impact research quality, contribute to research operations and best practice documentation, providing informal and formal mentorship
• Coordinate the production of highly actionable insights, translating complex data into compelling narratives, visuals, and frameworks that actively influence key decision-makers on the future product direction

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience conducting end-to-end user research leveraging mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) in a professional context
• Demonstrated ability to select, execute, and interpret insights from a wide range of methods (e.g., field studies, interviews, surveys, server logs, benchmark studies)
• Track record of owning and successfully completing large-scale, complex projects that resulted in significant, measurable influence on product or project direction
• Proven experience demonstrating leadership by creating new research questions and organizing the processes and people required to answer them
• Experience conducting research on highly technical, emerging products or complex systems with technical teams (e.g., engineering, science, systems)
• BA/BS degree in a Behavioral Science, Human Computer Interaction, or other related UX research field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice-to-haves

• M.A./M.S./Ph.D. (in progress or completed) in a social science field, Human Factors, or similar
• Experience with advanced survey design, quantitative analysis, and data visualization using tools like R/Python and SQL
• Experience in formally mentoring individual researchers and/or leading internal efforts to evolve the UX research discipline
• Portfolio demonstrating experience in taking on and structuring research problems in increasingly complex or novel domains or user populations
• Experience supporting a large organization, complex portfolio of products, and network of stakeholders on a small team or as the sole researcher for a domain
• Contributed to evolving the discipline of UX research outside of the immediate organization (e.g., conferences, publications, industry participation)

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