Principal UX Researcher

Your Impact on our Mission

Healthcare is complicated: people are anxious about their health, insurance coverage is obscure, and there’s uncertainty in finding the right type of care. Meanwhile, providers face thin margins, growing competition, and operational workflows that drown their staff in administrative burden. As a Principal UX Researcher, you'll immerse yourself deeply in understanding these problems, and own the research strategy for one of Zocdoc's two core user groups: the patients searching for care, or the practices delivering it. 
You'll report to the Director of Research and partner with Product, Design, Brand, Marketing, and Data Science leadership to proactively shape product strategy. You'll set the bar for high quality strategic quantitative and qualitative research that cuts across product teams and shapes the product roadmap. You'll identify unanswered research questions and unvalidated assumptions across the company, develop a clear POV on user needs, and use research insights to drive business objectives.
Your work will span three connected areas:

• Define who we're building for, and what they're trying to get done. You'll use a mixed-methods toolset to map the jobs, needs, and mindsets of our users, helping product, marketing, and sales teams see which needs matter most and how they differ meaningfully across groups.
• Shape high-ambiguity problem spaces with qualitative and quantitative evidence. You'll lead research for zero-to-one opportunities where there's little precedent and limited data. You'll help teams define the problem, test the assumptions underneath a proposed solution, evaluate concepts at scale, and decide what is worth building before a roadmap hardens around an answer.
• Measure the user experience. Help product teams understand how well our products actually meet user needs. That means partnering with Data Science to define user-centered metrics, then standing up survey programs and tracking that make them measurable over time. 

You’ll enjoy this role if you are…

• Personally motivated by being a positive change agent in the world and want to dive into solving complex social problems
• Energized by working across qual and quant
• Experienced working on cross-functional learning agendas with marketing and data science teams
• Driven to make the case for human-centred constructs in a data-driven organization
• Comfortable with full research domain ownership for your product space
• Motivated not just to continuously experiment with new AI tools and processes, but to help build sustainable agentic infrastructure that can scale across teams
• Serious about your work, but not about yourself

Your day-to-day is…

• Owning the research agenda for your audience, and scope and execute complex, multi-phase studies from early strategy through launch and iteration
• Designing and fielding quantitative research (including needs sizing, concept testing, and tracking), as well as own the sampling strategy for hard to reach populations
• Combining behavioral data with qualitative signal so teams understand not just where people drop off, but what they came to do and whether they got it
• Evolving our measurement program (tracking surveys, benchmarking, longitudinal and diary studies, continuous discovery) that holds the business accountable to user outcomes rather than proxy metrics
• Packaging old and new insights from diverse studies into memorable frameworks that are usable by diverse audiences
• Partnering beyond Product with Marketing, Brand, and Sales, so that one shared view of the user shapes positioning and go-to-market as well as the product roadmap
• Building and evolving new research systems that reduce one-off reactive research
• Mentoring junior researchers and bringing industry knowledge and expertise to our practice
• Representing UXR on business unit leadership teams

You’ll be successful in this role if you have…

• Meaningful (7+ years) experience in UX research and a strong mixed-methods research portfolio that showcases your adaptive process, precise and generative insights, and ability to impact product direction
• Genuine fluency in both qualitative and quantitative methods
• Real sampling judgment. You can say who a study did and didn't represent, and you've built ways to reach people who are small in number, busy, or guarded
• Experience defining measurement, not just consuming it: a tracking program, a benchmark, a segmentation, or a metric that a business actually adopted
• The ability to build and leverage research infrastructure including external sample, agencies, and contractor partners, as well as make a case for the budget behind them
• Depth in either consumer products at scale or B2B and SaaS products with complex, multi-stakeholder adoption
• Experience leading foundational, cross-functional research efforts, partnering with Data Science and Marketing as peers rather than as service providers
• Superb communication skills. You believe in keeping all of your stakeholders in the loop and know that multiple mediums of communication are the key to success
• A track record of influencing leaders who lack experience working with research
• Capability to zoom out to systems-level strategy and zoom in to execution details, and are comfortable navigating ambiguity and political nuance along the way

Benefits:

• Flexible, hybrid work environment at our convenient Soho location
• Unlimited Vacation
• 100% paid employee health benefit options (including medical, dental, and vision)
• Commuter Benefits
• 401(k) with employer funded match
• Corporate wellness program with Wellhub
• Sabbatical leave (for employees with 5+ years of service)
• Competitive paid parental leave and fertility/family planning reimbursement
• Cell phone reimbursement
• Catered lunch everyday along with beverages and snacks
• Employee Resource Groups and ZocClubs to promote shared community and belonging
• Great Place to Work Certified