Principal Researcher

Safelite•OH Mobile Pro & Sales, OH

About The Position

Safelite is the leader in auto glass service, continuously raising the bar for experiences that are easy, fast, and done. Digital is central to that ambition and to how we serve consumers, clients, and colleagues. We are seeking a Principal Researcher to strengthen how Safelite understands customers, clients, and colleagues, and make that understanding a consistent input to product strategy and investment decisions. Reporting to the Director of Product Design, you will lead the research practice as a senior individual contributor. You will shape the questions we pursue, lead the research with the highest strategic value, and build the practices that help teams develop deeper customer understanding and make better decisions. This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set the standard for research across the organization, mentor others in the craft, and stay close to the work, leading the complex research where judgment, depth, and experience matter most.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience Required
10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience in a product organization.
Deep fluency across qualitative and quantitative research methods, with strong judgment about which approach fits the question and decision.
A track record of research that materially influenced product, experience, or business direction.
Experience building or significantly advancing a research practice, including scalable and democratized discovery models.
Experience mentoring researchers, designers, and product managers on research craft and judgment.
Strong experience using behavioral and digital analytics alongside qualitative research, with platforms such as Quantum Metric, Heap, Amplitude, FullStory, or similar.
Demonstrated fluency using AI across study design, synthesis, analysis, pattern finding, and communication.
Experience working in continuous discovery and delivery environments where learning actively shapes what gets built next.
Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguity and influence senior stakeholders with evidence.

Responsibilities

Lead foundational and strategic research that informs product strategy, experience direction, and investment.
Identify the questions where deeper customer understanding can change the direction of the work.
Bring customer, client, and colleague understanding into roadmap, planning, and product strategy as an ongoing input, not a final validation step.
Connect qualitative research, behavioral data, voice of customer, and operational signals to build a richer and more current understanding of the experience.
Set the research practice across methods, standards, participant engagement, ethics, consent, and knowledge management.
Create clear standards and lightweight systems that make high-quality research easier to do across the organization.
Enable designers and product managers to run effective discovery themselves, with the right guidance, tools, and guardrails.
Mentor researchers, designers, and product managers on framing questions, choosing methods, conducting research, interpreting evidence, and applying what they learn.
Use AI and emerging research methods to increase learning velocity while protecting the rigor and judgment that make the learning trustworthy.
Translate research into frameworks, narratives, and decision tools that help teams determine what to do next.
Bring evidence and a clear point of view to senior leaders, including when the research challenges an existing assumption or direction.
Connect insights across studies and over time so teams see patterns in customer behavior and needs, not a collection of individual findings.
Track how research changes decisions, priorities, and outcomes, and use that feedback to continuously improve the practice.
Explore how customers, clients, and colleagues interact with conversational, agentic, and adaptive experiences.
Study how trust, expectations, control, transparency, recovery, and handoff change as experiences become more dynamic.
Partner with product and design teams to evaluate AI-enabled experiences using real customer behavior and conversations.
Develop research approaches for experiences that adapt based on the customer, context, and interaction.
Performs other duties as assigned
Complies with all policies and standards