Senior Director, User Research

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the primary UX research lead across multiple product teams, directly planning and executing complex generative and evaluative research studies.
• Partner with product design, product management, and engineering to embed customer empathy into our product development process, from discovery through launch.
• Build and scale user research operations: including participant recruitment processes, consent/data privacy guidelines, tooling, and insight repositories.
• Produce actionable, synthesized research outputs, personas, journey maps, opportunity frameworks, UX scorecards, etc. that influence product decisions.
• Define, track, and report UX metrics, usability benchmarks, and customer sentiment over time (in collaboration with data and analytics partners).
• Coach and mentor research teammates while maintaining personal involvement in key studies, ranging from 1:1 interviews and usability studies to multi-phase discovery research.
• Develop a roadmap for growing UX research as a practice and discipline horizontally across the organization.
• Evangelize the value of UX research to executive, product, and engineering stakeholders; create research education programs, playbooks, and onboarding experiences.
• Establish and scale research rituals and templates, study briefs, session guides, findings formats, presentation frameworks; to empower reproducible, high-quality work.
• Be a visible and credible voice for customer-centered thinking within FICO, in product planning meetings, quarterly roadmap reviews, and functional team ceremonies.
• Partner with other UX leaders to influence the overall design-maturity model for FICO's design and delivery ecosystem.

Requirements

• 12+ years of progressive experience in user research for digital products, including 5+ years in a leadership or player-coach capacity.
• Proven track record of executing hands-on generative and evaluative user research for B2B, enterprise, or technically complex software platforms.
• Experience building or scaling a research practice in a SaaS or product-led organization.
• Excellent working knowledge of UX research tools and methodologies across qualitative and quantitative methods (interviews, surveys, usability, card sorting, heuristic reviews, benchmarking).
• Portfolio or examples of past research work and impact, showing ability to translate findings into meaningful product change.
• High comfort level with complex information architectures, data-driven interfaces, and research in highly regulated or secure industries.
• Proven people management and coaching skills, including hiring and developing early-in-career talent.
• Experience conducting research for fintech, fraud detection, analytics, or AI/ML-based software platforms.
• Strong storytelling skills backed by data and ability to turn synthesis into narratives that influence strategy and feature decisions.
• Bachelor/Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Design Research, Anthropology, or a related field. A Master's or PhD is strongly preferred.

Nice to Have

• Experience in a highly regulated or secure industry.
• Experience with AI/ML-based software platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor/Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Design Research, Anthropology, or a related field.
• A Master's or PhD in a relevant field is strongly preferred.

Benefits & Perks

• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs.
• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events.
• Targeted base pay range for this role is: $151,000 to $236,000.