Staff Design Researcher
Intuit
Staff Design Researcher
Company Overview
Intuit is the global financial technology platform that powers prosperity for the people and communities we serve. With approximately 100 million customers worldwide using products such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp, we believe that everyone should have the opportunity to prosper. We never stop working to find new, innovative ways to make that possible.
Job Overview
Join our mission
Intuit is a global technology platform that helps our customers and communities overcome their most important financial challenges. We help give over 50 million consumers, small business, and self-employed customers around the world the opportunity to prosper.
Overview
Come join the Workforce Solutions team at QuickBooks and help create the next evolution of Workforce Solutions products! You’ll be working with a talented team to reimagine our payroll, HCM and time products, which is the engine that propels the QuickBooks ecosystem.
We are looking for a Staff Design Researcher to be the research champion for the Workforce Solutions design org. In this role, you will not only execute rigorous research but also drive strategy, influencing how we build features from concept to code. You will partner closely with cross-functional teammates to identify insights that will ultimately provide customer value and delight.
Responsibilities
How you will lead
As a Staff Design Researcher, you are a strategic partner and a craft leader. You will operate with high autonomy to align teams and elevate the research practice.
Strategic Leadership & Influence
Identify Opportunities Independently: Identify strategic opportunity areas where research is needed and prioritize them based on business needs, capacity, and timelines.
Advocate with Courage: Show accountability and courage to advocate for the team, customers, partners, and the business—even in tough conversations. You will balance inquiry and inclusion to effectively influence product direction.
Drive Strategy: Partner with Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Data to inform, refine, and iterate on the Workforce Solutions product strategy.
Research Execution & Rigor
End-to-End Leadership: Lead comprehensive research initiatives: ask the right questions to identify clear goals, form testable hypotheses, and deliver finalized research plans.
Design Rationale: Participate in and promote a culture of detailed feedback rooted in first principles, design rationale, and customer data.
Actionable Insights: Conduct evaluative and generative research to feed learnings back into the product, driving design decisions through data by partnering with our analytics team.
Scaling the Craft & Mentorship
Coach the Team: Act as a coach to the wider design team, providing guidance on when and how to conduct their own rapid tests.
Mentorship: Provide mentorship to junior researchers and designers from a craft and cross-discipline partnership perspective.
Elevate Standards: Regularly demonstrate research coaching abilities across all levels and functions, establishing a standard of excellence for the org.
Qualifications
What you’ll bring
We are looking for a researcher who combines deep empathy with high methodological rigor and the ability to synthesize complex data into clear frameworks.
Experience & Education
5+ years of experience leading user research for complex products with cross-product interdependencies.
Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, or a related field.
A portfolio that demonstrates a track record of successfully managing research engagements, from early-stage strategic research to usability studies, directly impacting business and product development.
Methodological Rigor & Proficiency
Expansive Toolkit: Consistently leverages an expansive research toolkit, including mixed methods (qualitative/quantitative/analytics), and applies novel approaches to open-ended problems.
Hybrid Data Fluency: High appreciation for the value of hard data; ability to integrate survey data and analytics into the research process to complement qualitative findings.
Remote Research: Proficiency in leading remote research and utilizing digital tools to connect with users globally.
Analysis & Synthesis
Strategic Triangulation: Leverages strong knowledge of products, platforms, and customer problems to triangulate multiple sources of data (e.g., qualitative data, survey data, analytics, external research) into strategic frameworks that inform product strategy decisions.
Visual Storytelling: Develops simple ways of visualizing insights to deliver complex ideas tailored to produce maximum impact for specific audiences (from engineering to executive stakeholders).
Strategic & Soft Skills
Agility: Experience working in an environment of lightweight and rapid experiments and iterations.
Communication: Strong storytelling and presentation skills; comfortable presenting findings to large audiences and senior stakeholders.
Navigating Ambiguity: Ability to navigate ambiguity and reimagine products that require a high degree of cross-team coordination.
Intuit provides a competitive compensation package with a strong pay for performance rewards approach. This position may be eligible for a cash bonus, equity rewards and benefits, in accordance with our applicable plans and programs (see more about our compensation and benefits at Intuit®: Careers | Benefits). Pay offered is based on factors such as job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and work location. To drive ongoing fair pay for employees, Intuit conducts regular comparisons across categories of ethnicity and gender. The expected base pay range for this position is:
Bay area: $179,500- $243,000