Senior UX Researcher

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.  

Last year, more than $3.3 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.  

As a Senior UX Researcher on the team, you'll collaborate with design, product, engineering and analytics to create high-quality user experiences for the clients and talent who use our product every day. You will bring the power of insights to design and business decisions. You will be empowered by a strong design and research culture to conduct research that results in products, messages, and experiences that help millions of users collaborate with distributed teams!

Your responsibilities:

• Be a core member of the Product team, ensuring User Research helps us meet our strategic business and user experience goals.
• Shape learning objectives and prioritize opportunities in partnership with Design, Product, Analytics, Marketing, and Engineering teams.
• Be responsible for conducting the right research, using the right methodologies, at the right time. Own the end-to-end planning and execution of research studies. 
• Conduct strategic to tactical mixed methods research — from foundational research to refine our understanding of personas and use cases, all the way to concept and usability testing. 
• Demonstrate high quality research practices and enrich our toolkit of methodologies.
• Study our diverse global user-base, crafting studies to test designs remotely and in different cultural contexts.
• Lead and participate in Design Thinking workshops, ensuring teams are ideating with a background in user empathy.
• Translate customer insights into actionable recommendations. Communicate insights within the product and engineering teams in a format that inspires action.
• Advocate research findings to diverse audiences through written reports, in-person presentations, or facilitation of co-synthesis and design thinking workshops.
• Hire and manage freelance researchers if deemed needed.

What it takes to catch our eye:

• Proven experience as a UX Researcher in a fast-paced, data-driven company 
• Track record of translating business needs into research questions, and insights into business impact
• Demonstrable experience guiding teams toward focusing on the most important research questions to answer, and creating mixed-method research plans for answering them
• Demonstrable experience creating useful, research-backed foundational UX documents (e.g Journey Maps, Personas, etc)
• Experience with mixed methods and the effective sequencing of attitudinal and behavioral studies
• Visualization of research insights in ways that go beyond “bullet points," while knowing when to deliver just bullet points
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, and extensive experience partnering seamlessly with cross-functional stakeholders
• Experience telling stories that resonate, using words, visuals, and data, as needed
• A self-starter, “tinker” attitude that proactively drives explorations
• Proven high bar for quality and attention to detail
• ***Portfolio is required***

Come change how the world works.

At Upwork, you’ll shape talent solutions for how the world works today. We are a remote-first organization working together to create exciting remote work opportunities for a global community of professionals.  While we have physical offices in San Francisco and Chicago, currently we also support hiring of corporate full-time employees in 19 states in the United States. Please speak with a member of our recruitment team to determine whether you are located in a state in which we are hiring corporate full-time employees. 

Our vibrant culture is built on shared values and our mission to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. We foster amazing teams, put our community first, and have a bias toward action. We encourage everyone to bring their whole selves to work and grow together through development opportunities, mentorship, and employee resource groups. Oh yeah, we’ve also got amazing benefits.

Check out our Life at Upwork page to learn more about the employee experience.   

Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.