Lead User Experience Researcher
UKG· enterprise· HR Software· Oct 22, 2026 · 6d ago
Lowell,MA,United States
In office
Full-time
Lead
$140K–$191K est.
7+ years exp
Job description
Why UKG:
At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform. Helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries. That’s what we do.
We never stop learning. We never stop challenging the norm. We push for better, and we celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you’ll get flexibility that’s real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters—and so do you.
About the team
UKG is building an AI-first suite that helps organizations become great places to work through HR, payroll, workforce management, and culture technology. Our products support more than 80,000 organizations.
You’ll join the User Experience Research team and report to the head of UX Research. In this leadership role, you’ll partner with Product, Product Operations, Data Science, Data Engineering, Engineering, and UX teams to improve AI-enabled product experiences.
About the role
As a Lead User Experience Researcher, you’ll lead quantitative and behavioral research that helps UKG understand how customers and end users adopt, trust, and use AI-powered products. You’ll connect behavioral data, user sentiment, experimentation, and product outcomes to generate actionable insights and guide product strategy.
In this role, you will:
• Lead behavioral research and analytics focused on adoption, trust, reliance, friction, hesitation, abandonment, and value realization.
• Develop descriptive and predictive insights across user segments, roles, journeys, and product experiences.
• Design behavioral telemetry and measurement frameworks that capture meaningful interactions, workflows, and touchpoints.
• Lead experiments, including A/B tests and quasi-experiments, to evaluate features, nudges, defaults, and levels of automation.
• Establish metrics that measure adoption, trust calibration, sustained usage, intervention effectiveness, and appropriate AI reliance.
• Translate complex behavioral and product data into decision frameworks, recommendations, and executive-ready narratives.
• Influence senior stakeholders on AI adoption, time-to-value, confidence-to-action, and product experience optimization.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Data Engineering to build scalable systems for behavioral data collection, experimentation, dashboards, and continuous insight generation.
• Mentor researchers and strengthen quantitative, behavioral, and data science capabilities across the UX Research team.
About you
Basic qualifications:
• 7+ years of experience in behavioral research, behavioral analytics, data science, or a related field within digital product environments.
• Experience conducting quantitative and behavioral research that drives measurable user and business outcomes.
• Experience building research data infrastructure, behavioral instrumentation, reporting frameworks, dashboards, or measurement programs.
• Expertise with methods such as experimentation, A/B testing, predictive modeling, segmentation, cluster analysis, conjoint modeling, or behavioral telemetry analysis.
• Experience analyzing adoption, trust, reliance behaviors such as following, verifying, or overriding recommendations, friction, and outcome patterns.
• Experience with AI-assisted or conversational experiences, including familiarity with machine learning, natural language processing, conversational analytics, journey modeling, or intent modeling.
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with large-scale behavioral and product datasets.
• Experience creating actionable insights, visualizations, dashboards, and executive-ready narratives.
• Ability to translate complex data into clear recommendations and influence product strategy through cross-functional partnership.
• Strong curiosity, reasoning, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
Preferred qualifications:
• Experience with enterprise software as a service (SaaS), workforce technology, human resources technology, or AI-enabled productivity platforms.
• Experience with Power BI, Looker, Visual Studio Code, Tableau, Claude, or similar analytics and AI-assisted tools.
• Experience partnering with Product, Product Operations, Data Science, Engineering, and UX teams on experimentation, onboarding, and AI experience optimization.
• Experience mentoring researchers or advancing quantitative, behavioral, and analytical practices across a UX organization.
• A collaborative approach grounded in respect, humility, curiosity, and entrepreneurial thinking.
Company Overview:
UKG is the Workforce Operating Platform that puts workforce understanding to work. With the world's largest collection of workforce insights, and people-first AI, our ability to reveal unseen ways to build trust, amplify productivity, and empower talent, is unmatched. It's this expertise that equips our customers with the intelligence to solve any challenge in any industry — because great organizations know their workforce is their competitive edge. Learn more at ukg.com.
Equal Opportunity Employer
UKG is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, disability, religion, sex, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, and other legally protected categories.
View The EEO Know Your Rights poster
UKG participates in E-Verify. View the E-Verify posters here .
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
Disability Accommodation in the Application and Interview Process
For individuals with disabilities that need additional assistance at any point in the application and interview process, please email UKGCareers@ukg.com .
The pay range for this position is $150,500 to $214,500. The actual base pay offered may vary depending on skills, experience, job-related knowledge and work location. In addition to base pay, employees may be eligible to participate in a performance-based bonus plan and to receive restricted stock unit awards as part of total compensation. Learn more about UKG’s benefits and rewards at ukg.com
Application prep
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