Director, UX Research

HighLevel is seeking a Director, UX Research to turn deep customer understanding into a practical driver of product and company strategy. This role leads a small senior research team in a 100% remote setting and takes direct ownership of the organization’s most consequential studies, while scaling customer insight across teams.

What you’ll do

• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Data, and Product Marketing to align on a shared research agenda, ensuring teams focus on the highest-impact questions rather than running parallel studies.
• Connect customer evidence across research, product analytics, Product Marketing, and customer-facing groups into a single, shared view of customer needs and opportunities.
• Lead foundational work, including segmentation, jobs-to-be-done, customer journeys, and agency and SMB operating models that informs company and portfolio strategy.
• Build and operate Voice of the Customer programs that synthesize NPS, CSAT, support themes, sales feedback, customer councils, and behavioral data into recurring insight teams can use for decisions.
• Personally lead high-stakes, mixed-methods studies, spanning problem framing, synthesis, recommendations, and follow-through.
• Scale research across the organization by training designers and product managers, providing guardrails and templates, and conducting study reviews to keep democratized research rigorous.
• Coach and develop researchers, including setting clear expectations for research craft, influence, and impact.
• Keep executives informed with regular, concise readouts on customer insight, emerging risks, and opportunities.
• Track research insights through to roadmap decisions and shipped changes, and report the impact on product and business outcomes.
• Use AI-powered tools thoughtfully to accelerate synthesis and analysis while protecting research quality, privacy, and customer trust.
• Collaborate effectively across US and India time zones in a remote-first environment.
• Build and scale a high-performing UX Research team, owning talent capability, leadership pipeline, structure, performance and career development standards, and resource allocation aligned to evolving product and business priorities.

What you bring

• 12+ years of relevant UX research, product research, or mixed-methods experience, including 5+ years leading researchers or research programs.
• Proven experience leading research in complex B2B SaaS, platform, or multi-product environments.
• A strong body of work showing research strategy, methodological judgment, synthesis clarity, and measurable influence on product and business outcomes.
• Expert command of qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, field research, usability testing, survey design, segmentation, concept testing, and longitudinal research.
• Demonstrated experience leading foundational research that changed product roadmaps or company strategy, not only feature-level decisions.
• Experience building Voice of the Customer programs and enabling non-researchers through training, standards, and review.
• Strong understanding of research design, sampling, statistical concepts, and tradeoffs behind research confidence.
• Proven ability to align Product, Design, Engineering, Data, Product Marketing, and executive leaders around shared customer evidence.
• Excellent executive communication, including experience briefing senior executives clearly and concisely.
• Fluency with modern research tools such as UserTesting and Dovetail, along with AI-assisted analysis and synthesis workflows.
• Comfort with bringing rigor to ambiguity, knowing when additional research is needed and when teams have enough evidence to move forward.
• The ability to create outsized impact from a small team by selecting the right problems and multiplying research capability across others.
• Ability to move across company strategy, customer insight, business outcomes, and hands-on research execution.
• Trust-building approach grounded in warmth, candor, accountability, direct feedback, and respect for teammates.
• Enjoyment and effectiveness collaborating across time zones and cultural contexts, including with US- and India-based teammates.
• Advocacy for accessibility, inclusion, ethical research, and AI experiences that stay aligned to customer goals.

Location: Remote (remote)
Compensation: USD 200,000 - 250,000 per yearly
Role level: 12+ years minimum experience

Technologies

• UserTesting
• Dovetail