What is the type of contract for this position?

The contract for this position is a Full-time contract

What's the salary range for the Lead UX Researcher position?

The suggested salary for this position is $126,000-$186,500*

Is telecommuting possible for this position?

No, telecommuting is not possible for this position

Lead UX Researcher job at Wayflyer

We’re looking for a Lead UX Researcher to help Wayflyer become a better informed and more empathetic organisation.

You’ll help us build and run the research team Wayflyer to help people think founder first and build great products by putting the people who use them at the heart of our design.

Our products will be better and genuinely useful, solving real problems for real users, thanks to your work.

As you read this ad, if you think you tick a lot of the boxes, but not all of them, we’d love to hear from you anyway, especially if you’re a woman or were raised in a culture that makes you underplay your achievements.

What you’ll do

As the lead researcher, you’ll help set up research at Wayflyer by contributing to the strategy, processes, and culture around it.

As Wayflyer’s first research leader, you’ll report to the VP of Research & Design, who you’ll advise and help grow the team. You’ll also help coach and mentor less-experienced members of the team as we grow.

You’ll influence how we build our products, services and tools (including ones used internally by colleagues) by showing how research can inform our work. You’ll get robust and reliable evidence about what makes our customers and users tick — what they do, how they do it, why they do it, what would help them do more and do it better — and share this information in a way that's easily accessible and applicable to our work.

You’ll work in multidisciplinary teams alongside content design, brand design, product design, product management, engineering, marketing and other disciplines, making sure that our teams build great products that address real needs.

To be more specific:

You’ll set up research at Wayflyer, by

defining and owning an ethical and effective end-to-end research process
understanding what teams across Wayflyer are trying to achieve so you can shape work to support their goals
helping the VP of Research & Design work out the kind of people we need to add to the team
teaching by doing and showing less experienced researchers and other teams how to effectively conduct their own studies to gain insights as needed.

You’ll influence how we build our products, services and tools, by

asking the questions no one realises we should be asking, and working out how we get the answers
making sure we’re clear in advance on what we want to learn when we speak to our customers and users
discovering the insights that make people question their assumptions and preconceptions, to help us build products that are more useful, usable and lovable
getting and sharing evidence, insights and data so we understand Wayflyer's customers and users better — their needs, desires, behaviour
making sure all we know about our customers is part of Wayflyer’s collective brain by making it easy to access, understand and use
prioritising effectively across the many demands for your talents.

Here’s what we see you doing in your first 90 days with Wayflyer:

Speak to key people at Wayflyer to understand how research can help them achieve their goals.
Work out the shape of the team needed and how we ‘build, buy or borrow’ the people and skills.
Assess previous research we’ve done and organise whatever’s still useful so it’s easy to share, access and navigate.
Set the initial quality bar for research by defining standards, methods and practices.
Shape and lead the research to build a rich, detailed understanding of the user experience of the ‘get funded’ journey.
Lead the work on customer segmentation to develop personas that describe Enterprise, Standard and Express customers in more detail, focusing on their needs and behaviours.

You can do most or all of the stuff mentioned above and can point to your real experience doing it. You’ve probably done it a companies of different shapes, sizes and industries. Given what we do, experience in financial services, fintech and business-to-business organisations is particularly interesting to us. On top of that, you

have a track record of leading-by-doing in high-performing teams that use research and insight to build incredible products that meet user needs and delight customers.
know how to find value by going deep into a problem or opportunity.
know when to use which research methods and practices to use to get a deep and rich understanding of the things that influence user behaviour and adoption.
communicate effectively, finding the best way to persuade and excite others about your work. Spoken, written, visual, dance — it’s up to you, though maybe leave out mime. We hate mime. (We don’t really hate mime. If it’s the best way to do the job, go for it.)
are comfortable working with the dynamism and volatility that comes with working at a startup like Wayflyer. What we mean by that is sometimes we’ll make decisions or change our approach to something quickly due to something we’ve learned or an external factor. It doesn’t mean working long hours at the expense of your personal life.
can find ways to contribute towards company goals without specific guidance. We’re looking for people who are like our customers: entrepreneurial and self-starting.
have a drive to keep improving and never settle for the status quo ‘because it’s always been done this way’. We hate Status Quo. (We don’t really hate Status Quo.) You’re always thinking of ways to improve and move towards goodness.
have introduced new practices — especially research — and skills to the places you’ve worked at.
are familiar with areas related to or overlapping with research, like service design.

Why join the Research & Design team at Wayflyer?

When we hire someone, we hire them for being them. Their experience and skills, of course – but also who they are and how they treat people. There’s a reason why ‘Be sound’ is one of our core values.

We’d rather not err at all, but when we do, we err on the side of being kind – being kind to ourselves and to other people.

What that means is we respect each other as more than simply work colleagues – we recognise people have lives outside of work and sometimes the two worlds collide. That might be you needing to do the school run every morning and starting your working day later; you might need to bring your dog to the office and all your meetings because no one is at home to look after her; your brain might be an unproductive, sleepy mush after a night of looking after a poorly child; or you might not be able to attend an in-person event because you haven’t been able to arrange childcare support. All of these are real life examples from the Research & Design team. None of these are career-limiting events. All of these were worked around with no effect on quality of work.

Yes, we’re ambitious and we set challenging goals. But not at the expense of our personal lives or what matters to us as humans.

You should never feel the need to put on an act or hide parts of yourself. We truly want you to bring your whole self to work and we work hard to create the safe space for people to do that.

What happens next?

We want to hear from you even if you think you’re not a 100% fit, especially if you consciously or unconsciously normally shy away from celebrating your achievements.

We’ll review and respond to every application we receive. If we’re interested in taking your application further, someone from our Talent Acquisition team will be in touch to find out more about you, what you’re looking for. They’ll also share more information about the full interview process.

If we take things to the next stage, we’ll want to see examples of work during one of the interviews, but we won’t ask you to do any ‘homework’ or prepare a special, polished presentation just for us.

About Wayflyer

Our mission is to empower eCommerce stores to unlock their full potential. Join us!

Wayflyer is revolutionising the eCommerce space by levelling the playing field for eCommerce founders across the world. Unlocking and fuelling their growth through solving their two biggest pain-points: funding and insights.

We use data to solve both of these challenges, empowering store owners with insights on how best to acquire customers online and providing them with short-term financing to scale and unlock their store's full potential.

We’re a fast-growing, venture-backed startup that serves a critical need for eCommerce entrepreneurs. You'll be joining a hyper-growth, ambitious, collaborative team that's working on a huge opportunity.

We have countless opportunities as we launch new markets and game-changing products and need teammates that love having high impact in a fast-moving and ambitious company.

Since launching in April 2020, we’ve deployed over $1.4b in funding across 8 countries to 2000+ eCommerce founders. In 2021 alone, the amount of funding we deployed to customers grew by 900%.

We recently announced our Series B, raising $150m in funding at $1.6bn valuation; backed by world-leading VCs including Left Lane Capital and DST Global and secured $500+ million debt financing via Credit Suisse & JP Morgan.

There are 300+ of us globally, split between our offices in Atlanta, Dublin, London and Sydney.

Here’s more info from our founder and you can learn more about our culture here.

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Lead UX Researcher

You’ll set up research at Wayflyer, by

You’ll influence how we build our products, services and tools, by

Here’s what we see you doing in your first 90 days with Wayflyer:

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