Senior User Researcher

A Place for Mom

4d•$135,000 - $160,000•Remote

About The Position

A Place for Mom is building the future of aging care, and we are looking for a Senior User Researcher to help us understand the people, journeys, and decisions behind that work. This role will strengthen the learning layer across Consumer and Provider experiences, helping product and design teams make better decisions with stronger evidence. APFM is organizing around the two customers that define our marketplace: families navigating care decisions and providers delivering care. Evolving toward a more connected experience across the full care placement journey. This is a senior, user-centered, product-embedded research role. You will work across squads and help APFM connect family decision journeys, provider realities, product data, marketplace signals, and business strategy into a clearer view of where to focus. This role is for someone who is curious about where research is going, not only where it has been. We do not expect anyone to have ten years of experience with tools that are only beginning to emerge. We do expect you to be actively experimenting with AI tools, learning where they help, where they fail, and how they can create leverage without replacing research rigor, participant privacy, human judgment, or deep user understanding.

Requirements

5+ years of user research, UX research, product research, design research, or mixed-methods research experience.
Strong command of qualitative research methods, including interviewing, usability testing, synthesis, and insight storytelling.
Experience influencing product strategy and design direction through research.
Ability to operate in ambiguity and prioritize research efforts against business, product, customer, and marketplace needs.
Experience pairing qualitative research with analytics, experimentation, surveys, funnel data, or operational data.
Demonstrated curiosity and hands-on experimentation with AI tools in the research or product development process.
Ability to explain not just what you learned, but how your methods, evidence, constraints, and judgment shaped product decisions.
Strong facilitation and communication skills with designers, product managers, engineers, analysts, marketers, operators, sales partners, and senior stakeholders.
Portfolio or work samples: Please include a portfolio, case studies, or work samples that show your research judgment, craft, synthesis, and decision influence. We are especially interested in work that shows how you move from ambiguity to clarity. Passion projects, research artifacts, AI-assisted experiments, or side projects are welcome if they help us understand how you think, learn, and communicate evidence outside of a standard case study format.

Nice To Haves

Experience in marketplaces, healthcare, senior care, consumer decision journeys, B2B workflows, provider experiences, or high-trust service experiences is a plus.
Bonus: examples of research artifacts, passion projects, prototypes, side projects, or AI-assisted experiments that show how you think, learn, and make evidence useful.

Responsibilities

Lead research across Consumer and Provider experiences
Independently own generative and evaluative research across Consumer and Provider experiences, helping teams understand APFM's two core customers: families navigating care decisions and providers growing their businesses while delivering care.
Shape and maintain a practical research plan tied to product strategy, design priorities, marketplace questions, and leadership decisions.
Plan and run interviews, usability studies, concept tests, journey research, surveys, diary or longitudinal studies when appropriate, and lightweight mixed-method studies.
Help teams understand families navigating senior care decisions and providers managing lead quality, engagement, and conversion.
Synthesize findings into crisp, decision-oriented artifacts that influence roadmap, product and user experience direction, service design, and product strategy, connecting research to the broader care placement journey where family needs, provider needs, advisor workflows, AI capabilities, and business outcomes intersect.
Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and customer-facing teams to connect qualitative insight with behavioral, funnel, marketplace, and business data.
Identify cross-squad patterns, unmet needs, trust gaps, high-risk assumptions, and experience risks before they become delivery problems.
Facilitate conversations that help teams align on what we know, what we need to learn, and what decisions should change.
Contribute to repeatable research practices so teams can learn faster without lowering the quality bar.
Use and improve lightweight rituals, templates, participant pipelines, and insight repositories that make Consumer and Provider insight easier to reuse.
Partner with designers and product managers on practical research planning, method selection, and evidence-backed decisions.
Model strong research craft and help teams choose the right level of rigor for the question, from rapid directional learning to deeper strategic research.
Experiment with AI-assisted workflows to accelerate research planning, desk research, transcript review, synthesis, pattern detection, and insight sharing.
Use AI responsibly: protect participant privacy, check for hallucinations or overconfident summaries, and keep human interpretation at the center of research judgment.
Help APFM evaluate AI-enabled product experiences for trust, usefulness, clarity, safety, adoption, and edge cases in moments where families and providers need confidence.
Share what you are learning with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and research partners so the team gets better together.