Principal Product Researcher

Credit Karma is now on a mission to become a comprehensive self driving financial platform that fuels our members in making progress wherever they may be in their journey. We are uniquely positioned to help our current, and future, Members take control of their financial lives. The Research team is looking for an experienced leader to influence change across the company through insight, proactively define company-wide research initiatives and unlock new potential for the role of research can play at CK. You’ll have the opportunity to make an impact not just on the product, but on how the organization works.  

About the Role:

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Mixed Methods Researcher to help advance our team and lead research initiatives that align to company priorities and span across multiple vertical business teams. As a member of our research organization, you’ll be playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of insights at Credit Karma and championing a member-centric approach to our products, business, and culture. 

Reporting to our Head of Research and partnering closely with cross functional leaders across the company, you will showcase the potential for insight to have impact on both our members and our business. Our team conducts exploratory, formative, and evaluative research studies that unlock business outcomes and enable teams to make informed and confident decisions. In this role you’ll be expected to shape future roadmaps, identify high priority and critical questions, and influence change across the company through your work. You are self-motivated, detail-oriented, and able to work efficiently and effectively with cross-functional teams. You can perform and improvise under tight timelines and changing environments. You are a natural leader and an advocate for our Members. You are an excellent communicator, excited to work closely with stakeholders, comfortable in a flat, fast moving, collaborative organization, and motivated by Credit Karma’s mission to help champion financial progress for all!

What you’ll do:

• Identify company-wide research topics and plan studies to deliver significant impact on our members and company
• Directly lead mixed methods research projects end-to-end, including planning, design, analysis, communication, and application of generative, formative, and post-launch evaluative research
• Package insights into durable tools, frameworks, and assets for designers, product managers, content strategists, and marketing partners to leverage (personas, frameworks, use cases, design principles, scenarios, etc)
• Drive leadership buy in and support by regularly meeting, presenting findings, connecting research insights to business outcomes and quantifying business value at the executive level
• Identify and shape creative and compelling ways to evangelize member-centricity, bring awareness to rigorously developed high quality insights, and the potential for integration of research throughout the company
• Define new programs, processes, and systems that help build the function of Research and Member Insights across the organization

Minimum Basic Requirement:

• 10+ years experience in applied research and consumer tech 
• Track record of proactively engaging and leading cross-functional teams through company-wide research initiatives, and delivering on measurable business outcomes
• Demonstrated ability to advocate for an organization’s customers and champion the effective integration of insights into the company 
• Demonstrated leadership in advancing the practice of research through high quality execution, identifying and creating relevant org-wide programs to grow the capability of the team
• Experience defining research roadmaps, prioritizing multiple efforts and leading highly complex multi-method research inquiries 
• Command of a broad set of qualitative and quantitative research and user-centered methods
• Expertise in quantitative research methods(surveys), experiment design,  behavioral analysis, and statistics
• Excellent communication skills, with strong ability to synthesize and communicate ideas visually, verbally, and in writing, influencing regularly at the executive level

Preferred Qualifications:

• Comfort and familiarity with quantitative methods, behavioral analysis, and/or statistical concepts
• Experience creating customer-centric deliverables (i.e. frameworks, journey maps, videos, etc.)
• Bonus: domain expertise in fintech
• A bachelor’s degree is required and a Masters or PhD degree is a bonus - a degree in Design, HCI, Communication, Social science, MSI, MBA, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Anthropology or a related field considered an advantage

What’s great about the opportunity:

• What we’re doing as a company is ambitious and purposeful: we’re offering free tools to people that help them improve their financial lives and what we’re doing as a team is fundamental to the company’s success
• We are a relatively new and evolving function within the company, so the landscape is wide open in terms of defining the best ways to work and ways to influence product definition and Member outcomes
• You’ll own research not just for the team’s current products that you’re responsible for, but the broader future that these experiences could help people achieve as well
• You have a built-in audience of 100 million+ people who rely on our product for help
• You’ll be establishing many of the practices and processes to make this team successful

Pay Transparency Notice: Credit Karma’s mission of championing financial progress for all starts from within. That’s why we implemented role-based compensation, which ensures people who are in the same role receive the same pay with variations for geographic location only. It’s all part of a more comprehensive DEI strategy that helps level the playing field. The base salary range for this role is $260,145 to $298,725, plus equity and benefits.