Senior UX Researcher

American Express•New York, NY

About The Position

American Express UX Research shapes experiences grounded in deep customer understanding. The team is expanding its research capabilities to bring customer evidence into strategic conversations earlier, uncover emerging opportunities, and shape connected, differentiated digital experiences. The Senior UX Researcher combines exceptional qualitative research craft, strategic thinking, and research leadership. As a core partner to the Design Strategy team, this role connects customer understanding with competitive intelligence, emerging trends, and business priorities to identify opportunities, inform future-state experiences, and influence strategic decisions before solutions are defined. The role calls for an accomplished strategic researcher with expertise in generative research, synthesis, and storytelling, and experience partnering with service design, experience strategy, and innovation teams. The researcher applies creativity and methodological rigor, navigates ambiguity, challenges assumptions, influences senior leaders, and elevates the work of other researchers.

Requirements

7+ years of UX research or applied research experience, with a track record leading complex generative and exploratory research programs.
Mastery of qualitative research, including interviewing, contextual inquiry, research design, and interpretive synthesis, with the ability to uncover latent needs and develop strategic insights and conceptual frameworks.
Experience partnering with service design, experience strategy, or innovation teams to shape future-state experiences, journey transformation, and strategic opportunities.
Experience incorporating competitive intelligence, market trends, strategic foresight, or emerging technologies into research to anticipate customer needs and inform experience strategy.
Ability to navigate ambiguity, challenge assumptions, and influence director- and VP-level stakeholders through evidence, strategic judgment, and storytelling.
Experience leading research across multiple researchers or complex workstreams, including setting learning agendas, guiding methodological choices, coaching others, and elevating research quality.
Strong quantitative literacy and ability to synthesize evidence across qualitative research, surveys, behavioral analytics, customer feedback, and secondary sources.
Employment eligibility to work with American Express in the United States; the company will not pursue visa sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with foresight methods such as horizon scanning, scenario exploration, or signals analysis, and their application to emerging customer and experience opportunities.

Responsibilities

Independently lead complex, ambiguous research from problem framing through executive decision-making.
Partner with Design Strategy, Product, and business leaders to establish forward-looking research agendas, uncover opportunities, and inform strategic priorities.
Design and lead rigorous qualitative research to uncover customer motivations, behaviors, unmet needs, and mental models.
Apply methodological judgment to select and adapt approaches, including interviewing, contextual inquiry, longitudinal studies, and participatory research.
Connect customer research with competitive intelligence, market trends, emerging technologies, and strategic foresight to anticipate changing expectations and identify opportunities.
Collaborate with experience strategists, service designers, and product leaders to investigate customer journeys and service ecosystems.
Translate research into opportunity frameworks, future-state concepts, and hypotheses that guide experimentation and investment decisions.
Triangulate qualitative and quantitative research, behavioral data, customer feedback, and external signals to identify patterns and opportunities.
Translate complex findings into compelling narratives and conceptual frameworks that establish shared understanding and drive decisions.
Serve as a thought partner to senior Product, Design, and Business leaders; connect customer insights with business priorities, challenge assumptions, and ensure research informs strategy, experimentation, and experience improvement.
Establish cohesive learning agendas, guide methodological decisions, and coordinate research across multidisciplinary engagements.
Coach researchers through complex challenges while maintaining high craft standards and a collaborative, intellectually rigorous environment.
Develop rigorous approaches to exploring and evaluating emerging experiences, technologies, and service innovations.
Strengthen research practice through reusable frameworks, critical review, and responsible experimentation with AI-enabled tools and methods.