[Hiring] Principal Researcher @Safelite

Role Description

We are seeking a Principal Researcher to strengthen how Safelite understands customers, clients, and colleagues, and make that understanding a consistent input to product strategy and investment decisions.

Reporting to the Director of Product Design, you will lead the research practice as a senior individual contributor. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will:

• Shape the questions that matter
• Lead foundational and strategic research that informs product strategy, experience direction, and investment.
• Identify the questions where deeper customer understanding can change the direction of the work.
• Bring customer, client, and colleague understanding into roadmap, planning, and product strategy as an ongoing input, not a final validation step.
• Connect qualitative research, behavioral data, voice of customer, and operational signals to build a richer and more current understanding of the experience.
• Raise the quality of research
• Set the research practice across methods, standards, participant engagement, ethics, consent, and knowledge management.
• Create clear standards and lightweight systems that make high-quality research easier to do across the organization.
• Enable designers and product managers to run effective discovery themselves, with the right guidance, tools, and guardrails.
• Mentor researchers, designers, and product managers on framing questions, choosing methods, conducting research, interpreting evidence, and applying what they learn.
• Use AI and emerging research methods to increase learning velocity while protecting the rigor and judgment that make the learning trustworthy.
• Turn understanding into direction
• Translate research into frameworks, narratives, and decision tools that help teams determine what to do next.
• Bring evidence and a clear point of view to senior leaders, including when the research challenges an existing assumption or direction.
• Connect insights across studies and over time so teams see patterns in customer behavior and needs, not a collection of individual findings.
• Track how research changes decisions, priorities, and outcomes, and use that feedback to continuously improve the practice.
• Advance research for AI-enabled experiences
• Explore how customers, clients, and colleagues interact with conversational, agentic, and adaptive experiences.
• Study how trust, expectations, control, transparency, recovery, and handoff change as experiences become more dynamic.
• Partner with product and design teams to evaluate AI-enabled experiences using real customer behavior and conversations.
• Develop research approaches for experiences that adapt based on the customer, context, and interaction.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience Required
• 10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience in a product organization.
• Deep fluency across qualitative and quantitative research methods, with strong judgment about which approach fits the question and decision.
• A track record of research that materially influenced product, experience, or business direction.
• Experience building or significantly advancing a research practice, including scalable and democratized discovery models.
• Experience mentoring researchers, designers, and product managers on research craft and judgment.
• Strong experience using behavioral and digital analytics alongside qualitative research, with platforms such as Quantum Metric, Heap, Amplitude, FullStory, or similar.
• Demonstrated fluency using AI across study design, synthesis, analysis, pattern finding, and communication.
• Experience working in continuous discovery and delivery environments where learning actively shapes what gets built next.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguity and influence senior stakeholders with evidence.

Benefits

• Competitive weekly pay and bonus opportunities.
• Total job benefits valued at more than $10k, including a 401(k) plan with company matching, medical coverage plans customized to suit your needs, and a commitment to work/life balance through our paid time off (PTO) programs, company holidays, and paid volunteer days.
• Up to $5,250 in tuition reimbursement per year.