Sr. UX Researcher

Who are we?

Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6500 organizations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.

We are looking for a Senior UX Researcher to contribute to our end-to-end research across our product organization. This is a research-first role: you will spend the majority of your time generating and evaluating user insights that directly shape product direction. You will also bring light design sensibility to the way you communicate findings, and contribute modestly to our design system at the code level. This is not a design engineering role. If you thrive on deep human understanding, are fluent in both discovery and validation methods, and know how to turn research into decisions — this is built for you.

How will you contribute?

Research (Primary — 80%)

• Plan and execute generative research: user interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, and ethnographic observation to uncover unmet needs and opportunity spaces.
• Design and run evaluative research: usability studies, concept testing, prototype reviews, and survey-based validation at key product milestones.
• Define research questions collaboratively with product, design, and engineering partners, then own execution from recruitment through synthesis.
• Develop and maintain a research repository that makes insights discoverable and actionable across teams.
• Communicate findings clearly to audiences ranging from ICs to senior leadership, adapting depth and format to the audience.
• Advocate for the user in roadmap and prioritization conversations, backed by evidence.
• Contribute to and evolve team research standards, tools, and practices.

Design & Communication (20%)

• Create clear, well-structured deliverables that translate research into action: journey maps, synthesis artifacts, storyboards, annotated findings decks, and opportunity frameworks.
• Collaborate closely with product designers to ensure research insights are reflected in design decisions and interaction patterns.
• Facilitate participatory design activities and co-creation sessions with users and internal stakeholders.

Front-End Contribution (Light)

• Make targeted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript contributions to our design system — primarily to support research prototypes and interactive stimuli for studies.
• Work within existing component library patterns; you won’t be architecting systems or building production features from scratch.
• Collaborate with design engineers to ensure research prototypes accurately represent intended interactions.

What will you bring?

Research Expertise

• 5+ years of UX research experience, with a demonstrated mixed-methods practice spanning both generative and evaluative approaches.
• Deep fluency in qualitative methods (interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies) and strong working knowledge of quantitative methods (surveys, behavioral analytics, A/B test interpretation).
• Experience recruiting and managing research participants across diverse populations.
• Proven ability to design research that drives product decisions — not just informs them.
• Familiarity with research operations: managing vendors, tools, panels, and research repositories.

Design Fluency

• Ability to produce polished, well-structured synthesis artifacts — journey maps, mental model diagrams, opportunity frameworks — that designers and PMs can act on directly.
• Proficiency with Figma or equivalent tool.