Staff UX Researcher

Newfire Global Partners•Boston, MA

3d•$148,000 - $201,000•Remote

About The Position

Studio@Newfire is the embedded UX practice of Newfire Global Partners. We partner with healthcare technology organizations — payers, providers, virtual care companies, and health-tech startups — to design software that genuinely works for the clinicians, care coordinators, and administrative staff who use it every day. Research is the foundation of everything we do. It's not a phase that happens at the start of a project — it's a continuous practice that keeps the team honest about whether we're solving the right problems for the right people. As our Staff UX Researcher, you'll be the most senior research voice on a team. You won't just execute studies — you'll shape the research agenda, determine what the team doesn't yet know and why it matters, and design programs that translate user insight into product and business direction. You'll influence how designers and product managers think about users, and you'll build the frameworks and practices that make our research function scalable across clients and engagements. This is a role for someone who generates direction, not just output — someone who can walk into a room of product and engineering leaders, earn their trust, and change how they make decisions.

Requirements

6+ years of professional UX research experience with a strong track record of leading initiatives that measurably influenced product strategy or business direction
Deep expertise across a broad research toolkit — generative and evaluative, qualitative and quantitative — with the judgment to know when to use each
Experience designing multi-phase research programs, not just individual studies
Background in healthcare, regulated industries, or complex enterprise software strongly preferred; direct experience with clinical workflows, payer systems, or care delivery a significant plus
Experience conducting research with users who are navigating high-stakes, high-complexity systems (healthcare, financial services, government services, etc.)
Comfortable in embedded, long-term client engagements — building relationships with product and engineering partners alongside design colleagues
Comfortable also leading consulting-style engagements — building and managing relationships with client stakeholders and leading small teams of other UX professionals
Systems thinker who can design research that captures how a workflow actually functions — not just how it's supposed to
Strong storyteller who can translate nuanced findings into clear, compelling narratives for non-researcher audiences including executive stakeholders
Able to work across the research-to-design handoff fluidly — not just delivering a report, but staying engaged through how insights get applied
Familiar with research operations: participant recruitment, consent processes, repository management, and the operational realities of running research at scale
Experienced with research tools across the full stack (e.g., Dovetail, UserZoom, Optimal Workshop, Figma for collaborative synthesis, etc.)
Driven to understand how healthcare systems actually work — and motivated by the stakes involved for the people using them
Proactive: identifies the research gap before anyone else names it, and brings a plan alongside the observation
Influential without being positional — earns trust through rigor and communication, not hierarchy
Comfortable operating without a fully defined roadmap; brings structure to ambiguity rather than waiting for it to resolve

Nice To Haves

Background in healthcare, regulated industries, or complex enterprise software strongly preferred; direct experience with clinical workflows, payer systems, or care delivery a significant plus

Responsibilities

Research Leadership Design and lead multi-phase, mixed-methods research programs — from early generative discovery through evaluative testing — calibrated to what each project and client actually needs to learn
Select and defend method choices: know when a survey is the right answer and when it's a crutch, when you need fieldwork and when a remote interview will do
Synthesize across studies to identify patterns that aren't visible at the individual-study level — connecting dots across users, workflows, and time
Identify the questions the team hasn't thought to ask yet, and make the case for why they matter
Research Craft Lead journey mapping, service blueprinting, mental modeling, and other systems-level research artifacts that help product and engineering teams see the full picture
Integrate qualitative findings with quantitative and behavioral data — knowing how to combine the two to tell a more complete story
Build and maintain a living research repository that makes past insights findable, reusable, and genuinely used
Apply AI-powered tools to accelerate synthesis, recruitment, and documentation — thoughtfully and with appropriate skepticism
Influence & Advocacy Serve as the primary user advocate in product planning, roadmap conversations, and design critiques — not as a gatekeeper, but as someone who helps the team hold complexity
Partner with designers to translate research findings into design direction, and with PMs to translate them into prioritization rationale
Present findings to client leadership in ways that shift perspective — not just reports, but stories that change how decisions get made
Practice Development Coach designers and junior researchers on research methods, synthesis techniques, and how to have productive conversations with users
Develop frameworks, templates, and norms that improve how the whole team conducts and communicates research
Champion a culture of curiosity and evidence across client organizations — helping PMs and engineers become more research-literate, not just research-dependent