Lead UX Researcher, AI & Digital Experiences

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

The Lead User Researcher will join Salesforce’s Digital User Research team within Digital Marketing Technology, delivering objective, actionable insights that shape customer-facing experiences and internal tools across Salesforce’s digital marketing portfolio. The role owns research across two strategic areas: agentic experiences and event technology. It investigates emerging mental models, unmet needs, friction, and expectations around trust, transparency, control, guidance, and human support, while also improving digital experiences for in-person, virtual, and on-demand events. The researcher leads work across multiple products and stakeholder groups, sets strategy across a portfolio of projects, and builds alignment around high-priority questions and opportunities. The role translates ambiguous business and product questions into rigorous research plans, combines qualitative and quantitative evidence, and communicates findings that influence product strategy and experience decisions. It also advances research methods and measurement standards, supports responsible uses of AI, mentors others, and champions inclusive and accessible research. Onsite event research requires travel approximately four to five times per year.

Requirements

Deep expertise in qualitative research and strong fluency in quantitative methods.
Ability to plan, design, execute, analyze, and communicate foundational, generative, evaluative, and measurement research at strategic and tactical levels.
Strong judgment in research-question development, method selection, audience recruitment, evidence quality, and methodological rigor.
Comfort conducting research in fast-paced, live-event environments and ability and willingness to travel approximately four to five times per year for onsite research at Salesforce events.
Record of identifying high-value research opportunities and influencing product strategy, roadmaps, requirements, designs, and measurable business outcomes.
Strong understanding of digital marketing experiences and ability to connect research evidence to customer and employee needs, business goals, channel strategies, technical considerations, and broader portfolio implications.
Working knowledge of basic statistical concepts and behavioral data, and ability to interpret survey findings, digital analytics, and experimentation results alongside qualitative evidence while communicating limitations.
AI fluency and experience building AI-assisted research workflows, with judgment about appropriate uses of AI and how to prevent automation from distorting findings.
Strong facilitation, storytelling, and communication skills, including tailoring evidence and recommendations for product teams, cross-functional leaders, and executives.
Experience strengthening a research practice through mentoring, reusable frameworks, enablement, and research knowledge systems.
Ability to deliver high-quality work under constrained timelines and collaborate across globally distributed teams and time zones.
Commitment to responsible, ethical, and inclusive research, particularly in rapidly evolving AI contexts.

Responsibilities

Proactively identify research needs, gaps, and opportunities, and provide an evidence-based point of view to inform research priorities across the digital marketing portfolio.
Scope and plan multiple research projects end to end, defining decisions, milestones, dependencies, audiences, methods, risks, and success measures.
Translate ambiguous business and product questions into strategic and tactical research plans, adapting plans as evidence and business context evolve.
Combine qualitative and quantitative methods to answer complex questions and deliver a comprehensive view of the evidence.
Define appropriate audiences and recruitment criteria, protect data quality, and ensure findings represent intended users and contexts.
Synthesize user research, analytics, experimentation, and industry research; identify patterns and communicate confidence and limitations.
Build understanding of customer and employee needs, digital behaviors, marketing goals, and evolving technologies to uncover opportunities across channels and journeys.
Research how people understand, trust, and engage with AI agents, including expectations for autonomy, transparency, control, personalization, oversight, failure recovery, and escalation.
Establish customer-centered measures of usefulness, task success, quality, trust, adoption, and agent performance across AI-powered experiences.
Conduct foundational and evaluative research for in-person, virtual, and on-demand event experiences, including onsite observation, intercept interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
Translate evidence into recommendations, strategic guidance, measurement frameworks, and future-state direction that shape digital strategies, roadmaps, requirements, and experiments.
Create research narratives and data visualizations, present to product teams and executives, and facilitate workshops that lead to aligned decisions and actions.
Advance research methods, reusable tools, measurement standards, and responsible uses of AI; mentor others and champion inclusive and accessible research.