Lead UX Researcher, AI & Digital Experiences

Salesforce•San Francisco, CA

3d•$172,500 - $285,800

About The Position

Salesforce’s Digital User Research team, part of Digital Marketing Technology, delivers objective, actionable insights to shape customer-facing experiences and internal tools across the digital marketing portfolio. As Lead User Researcher, you will lead research in two strategic areas: agentic experiences and event technology. You will investigate how people understand and engage with AI agents, including their needs around trust, transparency, control, guidance, and human support, and improve digital experiences for Salesforce’s in-person, virtual, and on-demand events. You will lead research across multiple products and stakeholder groups, develop research strategy across a portfolio of projects, and build alignment around important questions and opportunities. The role calls for combining qualitative and quantitative methods, integrating evidence from research and other sources, and communicating findings that influence product strategy and experience decisions. You will also advance research practices, measurement standards, responsible uses of AI, and inclusive, accessible research.

Requirements

Deep expertise in qualitative research and strong fluency in quantitative methods, with sound judgment in research questions, method selection, recruitment, evidence quality, and methodological rigor.
Ability to plan, design, execute, analyze, and communicate foundational, generative, evaluative, and measurement research at strategic and tactical levels.
Comfort conducting research in fast-paced live event environments and willingness and ability to travel approximately four to five times per year for onsite Salesforce event research.
A record of proactively 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 and integrate survey findings, digital analytics, and experimentation results with qualitative evidence while communicating limitations.
Demonstrated AI fluency and experience building AI-assisted research workflows, with judgment about where AI adds value, where human expertise is essential, and how to prevent automation from distorting findings.
Strong facilitation, storytelling, and communication skills, including experience 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 on 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

Identify emerging research needs, gaps, and opportunities, and provide an evidence-based point of view to inform research priorities across the digital marketing portfolio.
Independently scope and plan multiple 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 the approach as evidence and business context evolve.
Combine qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, contextual inquiry, jobs-to-be-done research, concept evaluation, usability testing, task studies, surveys, benchmarking, and experimentation.
Define audiences and recruitment criteria, protect data quality, and ensure findings represent the people and contexts the product is intended to serve.
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, human oversight, failure recovery, and escalation.
Establish customer-centered measures of usefulness, task success, quality, trust, adoption, and agent performance across connected 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 turn findings into aligned decisions and follow-up actions.
Advance research methods, reusable tools, measurement standards, and responsible uses of AI; mentor others; and champion inclusive and accessible research.