Research Operations Lead

Join Justworks as a Research Operations Lead, where you'll build scalable research systems, transform participant recruitment infrastructure, and define research ethics and data governance standards. You'll have significant autonomy, partner closely with leadership, and increase insights fluency across the organization. Enjoy benefits like paid volunteer work, parental leave, work from home opportunities, and extensive learning and development opportunities.

• Lead research operations by defining the vision, roadmap, and OKRs for Research & Insights operations, and translating it into a sequenced operating plan.
• Transform participant recruitment infrastructure by designing and scaling a system that provides reliable, ethical, and efficient access to customers.
• Establish and govern the Research Knowledge Orchestration system, building a living repository that makes it easy for anyone to find what we know.
• AI-forward — You ask of every workflow: what requires human judgment, and what can be automated? You don't just use AI tools — you build with them, replacing manual work with intelligent automation
• Consultative — You build relationships, understand problems, and co-design solutions through open-ended questions and active listening. You don't impose systems — you build them with the people who'll use them
• Stakeholder influence — You build trust and alignment across Research, Design, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement — making the case for infrastructure investment with data and story
• Autonomous and self-directed — You operate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying what needs to happen and making it happen. You own the strategy and are accountable for outcomes
• Ethical practice — You bring care and rigor to participant privacy, data governance, and research ethics. Good operations protect people, not just processes
• Strategic and systems thinking — You connect a recruiting pain point to a knowledge gap to a missed business decision and design a coherent operational response. You build for today and architect for scale
• Experience with research and insight management platforms such as Great Question, Qualtrics, Dovetail, User Interviews, dscout, and Figma
• Background in compliance-sensitive environments (e.g., fintech, SaaS, enterprise B2B) is a strong plus
• Experience working in a technology environment, including a deep understanding of experience design, user research, and product development processes
• Proven track record (6-8 years, with demonstrated experience at a staff or principal level) of building and scaling operational systems and governance structures - ideally in the context of market or UX research
• Experience applying AI tools and building AI-powered workflows — for knowledge retrieval, research synthesis, automation, or insight distribution
• Strong cross-functional partnership and lateral leadership skills, with experience working across Product, Design, Marketing, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement
• Track record of operating independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Exposure to research methods in UX, market research, design research, and/or strategic research, and an interest in going deeper