Staff Product Researcher

Nelnet•Remote - Nebraska, NE

1d•$100,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology, education services, and learning management solutions to education and faith-based organizations, serving more than 1,300 higher education institutions, 11,500 K-12 schools, 3,500 churches, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters across the globe. Our culture of service enables us to form long-lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers our customer communities to thrive. As a Nelnet company, the perks at NBS go beyond our benefits package. You’re part of a community, invested in you as an individual and united by our mission to create opportunities for people where they live, learn and work. You are an experienced product and UX researcher who turns questions into evidence and evidence into better products. As the research expert in the room, you diagnose what kind of research a problem actually needs, design the right study, run it, and bring back insight people can act on — as comfortable moderating a focus group as digging through the data for the next signal. This is a founding research seat: beyond doing the work, you’ll define how we do research here — the process, the standards, and a modern AI layer that lets a small team punch far above its weight.

Requirements

5+ years in an applied research setting (product, UX, or academic).
Hands-on with the full range of research methods — interviews, usability and moderated/unmoderated testing, contextual inquiry, surveys, and focus groups.
Experience owning every stage of research: study design, recruiting, moderation, analysis, and reporting.
Comfort with quantitative data and behavioral analytics, not just qualitative work.
A strong presenter who can make findings land with both peers and executives.
Willingness to travel to schools for in-person field research a few times a year.

Nice To Haves

Experience using AI to do research — building agents or automating parts of the research process to improve speed, depth, or quality.
Proficiency with research and product-analytics tools (e.g., Pendo and common user-testing, survey, and research-repository platforms).
Comfort working with AI tools such as Claude Code.
Experience in education, EdTech, or another multi-stakeholder domain.

Responsibilities

Lead research end to end — user interviews, usability testing, focus groups, surveys, and mixed-methods studies — owning the plan, recruiting, moderation, analysis, and a clear report covering goals, needs, pain points, and the touchpoints that matter.
Decide what research is needed — read the problem, choose the right approach for the decision and its risk, and know when a quick feedback pass is enough versus when something warrants a full study.
Build our AI research capability — create and refine agents that draft plans, synthesize data, and produce reports, and stand up autonomous research wherever a task doesn’t require a human in the loop.
Set the standard — turn your best work into reusable, high-quality templates (surveys, study plans, test plans, reports) that both people and agents fill out consistently, and define our research process and best practices.
Mine our own data for signals — as a power user of Pendo and a close reader of call transcripts, support data, and qualitative and quantitative feedback, proactively surface the trends that should shape the roadmap or trigger deeper research.
Get out into the field — travel to partner schools to spend a few days alongside teachers, staff, administrators, parents, and board members, running interviews, focus groups, and feedback sessions.
Partner across the company — work with marketing, operations, and sales to understand customers from every angle, and with product strategy and design to translate insight into product, roadmap, and design decisions.
Own how we collect and keep research data — work with internal teams and data governance to capture, store, and make research data retrievable so anyone can find a past study or its findings later.
Present — tell the story of what you found to teams and leadership in a way that drives confident decisions.