Lead UX Researcher

About Descript

Descript is an intuitive, AI-powered, collaborative, all-in-one video platform that makes it easy for anyone to create, edit, and share a video. Our goal is to make video editing easy enough for everyone on your team, and powerful enough for your video team.

We’re a product-led, customer-centric company that values craft, speed, and clear thinking. User research plays a central role — not just in understanding users, but in helping teams build better product intuition and ultimate better products for our customers.

About the role

We’re hiring a lead UX researcher to shape product decisions and how we practice user research across Descript.

You’ll operate as a senior IC, owning ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end, while also helping teams get closer to users through better tools, systems, and habits. This includes foundational and ethnographic research, improving how we synthesize and share insights, and enabling PMs and designers to run high-quality research themselves.

Descript serves a wide range of creators and enterprises with different workflows and goals. This role is key to helping us deeply understand those users, and ensure that understanding consistently drives product decisions.

If you’re excited about being part of a customer-obsessed culture, owning high-impact research and scaling its influence across a product org, we’d love to talk.

What you’ll do

Drive UX and product research

• Lead end-to-end UX research studies across large, ambiguous problem spaces
• Identify key unknowns and define the most appropriate research questions and methods to inform product decisions
• Conduct exploratory, evaluative, and longitudinal research (e.g. ethnography, usability, concept testing)
• Partner closely with PMs, designers, and product marketing, as well as data science, customer support, sales, and engineering, to ensure research is connected to both product decisions and real user feedback loops

Understand users and shape product direction

• Develop a deep understanding of our customers, their creative goals, and the evolving AI video landscape — and use those insights to guide the product roadmap
• Study how people create content, both inside and outside of using Descript — map and maintain a library of workflows, mental models, and friction points across users and use cases
• Synthesize findings into clear, actionable outputs that drive decisions (e.g. frameworks, highlight reels, journey maps)

Scale UX research across the organization

• Coach PMs and designers to plan and run their own research, and increase the number of teams able to run high-quality research independently
• Manage research operations systems, automating where possible, for participant recruitment, feedback management, and insight sharing
• Introduce new methods, tools, and rituals to improve how research is conducted, managed and shared
• Find creative and pragmatic ways to bring employees closer to the voice of the customer
• Host and manage programming for Insight Safari — a company-wide casual weekly gathering where we watch and discuss minimally edited user research footage together

Who you are

Experience

• 5+ years of UX research experience
• Experience working closely with product and design teams (not purely agency role)
• Experience building out a collaborative research practice within a product org, where you’ve used your expertise to mentor or train others in how to conduct high-quality user research
• Experience building out and maintaining research operation systems for managing study participation, feedback, research recordings, and the insights gleaned from that research
• Track record of concretely influencing product and strategic decisions
• Ability to scale a research practice using AI tools while maintaining the integrity of the research

Skills

• Strong across both quantitative and qualitative UX research methods: your toolbox contains various tools to get to the most actionable insights (e.g., facilitating 1:1 calls with customers, conducting unmoderated research studies, short & long-form surveys, mining sales &