Principal Researcher

Slack is seeking a Principal Researcher to help understand how AI agents are changing the way people work together,and what that means for the future of workplace collaboration.

In this role, you will investigate how people and teams adopt, collaborate with, and delegate work to AI agents. You will explore not only individual experiences with AI, but also how agents affect shared context, coordination, communication, trust, and accountability across teams.

Your research will help identify where agents create meaningful value, where they introduce friction or risk, and how Slack can better support collaboration among people and agents.

As a Principal-level individual contributor, you will independently shape and execute a research agenda with a primary focus on Slack's Ecosystem, understanding how AI agents affect the future of workplace collaboration.

You will pair foundational research on emerging work practices with practical evaluation of product experiences, translating evidence into clear recommendations that influence product strategy and development.

You will also mentor researchers and strengthen how the team conducts and applies research.

Core Responsibilities & Scope

• Lead research scoping, prioritization, and roadmapping across multiple teams focused on AI agents and workplace collaboration, turning ambiguous questions into focused, actionable research programs.
• Study real-world workflows to understand how people discover, adopt, delegate to, supervise, and collaborate with agents,and how those behaviors affect team coordination, shared understanding, trust, and accountability.
• Design and conduct rigorous foundational and evaluative research using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, balancing depth, speed, and the limits of what each approach can establish.
• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, Data Science, and other insights functions to connect customer evidence with product decisions and triangulate findings across studies, behavioral data, and customer feedback.
• Build compelling narratives and reusable frameworks that synthesize multiple lines of inquiry, identify new product opportunities, and make the user and business consequences of decisions clear.
• Influence senior stakeholders through practical, evidence-based recommendations; help teams distinguish emerging signals from assumptions and prioritize the most important uncertainties.
• Mentor colleagues and collaborate with Research Operations to improve research practices, tools, documentation, and the team's ability to deliver high-quality work efficiently.

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of user or product research experience, or equivalent demonstrated experience delivering research at comparable scope and impact. A track record of independently leading ambiguous research across multiple product teams is more important than tenure alone.
• Expertise in multiple research approaches, with strong qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis skills and sound judgment about methodological trade-offs.
• Demonstrated experience translating research into product strategy, roadmap priorities, or consequential product decisions in a fast-moving product organization.
• Strong synthesis, storytelling, and communication skills, including experience partnering with senior stakeholders and creating frameworks that help teams understand and act on evidence.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and mentoring skills, along with working fluency in AI assistants and agents and curiosity about their effects on real workplace behavior.

Preferred Qualifications

• Research experience with AI assistants, agents, automation, or human–AI interaction, including questions of delegation, oversight, trust, explainability, or recovery from errors.
• Experience studying workplace collaboration, enterprise SaaS, knowledge workers, or multi-person and organizational workflows.
• Experience with longitudinal studies, diary studies, contextual inquiry, or field research that captures how emerging tools become part of everyday work.
• Experience partnering with Data Science to connect observed behaviors and customer needs with usage data and product evaluation.
• Experience researching enterprise adoption, administrator needs, governance, or adoption barriers for emerging technologies.

Benefits

• Time off programs
• Medical, dental, vision
• Mental health support
• Paid parental leave
• Life and disability insurance
• 401(k)
• Employee stock purchasing program