Lead User Researcher

Join Salesforce’s Digital User Research team, part of Digital Marketing Technology, as a Lead User Researcher. You will own research across two of the team's most strategic areas: agentic experiences and event technology. You will help teams understand emerging mental models, unmet needs, friction, trust, and where people need transparency, control, guidance, or human support.

Responsibilities

• Shape Research Strategy by proactively identifying emerging research needs, surface gaps and opportunities, and provide a clear, evidence-based point of view to inform research priorities across the digital marketing portfolio.
• Independently scope and plan multiple projects end to end, defining the decisions to inform, milestones, dependencies, audiences, methods, risks, and measures of success.
• Translate ambiguous business and product questions into strategic and tactical research plans, reframing the opportunity and adjusting the approach as the evidence and business context evolve.
• Creatively combine qualitative and quantitative methods to overcome constraints and deliver a more complete picture of the data.
• Define credible audiences and recruitment criteria, protect data quality, and ensure findings appropriately represent the people and contexts the product is intended to serve.
• Connect evidence across sources by synthesizing user research, analytics, experimentation, and industry research to identify patterns, communicate confidence and limitations, and deliver a more complete understanding of the user experience.
• Build a deep understanding of customer and employee needs, digital behaviors, marketing goals, and evolving technologies to uncover opportunities across channels, journeys, audiences, and connected digital experiences.
• Advance agentic experience research. Study how people understand, trust, and engage with AI agents, including expectations for autonomy, transparency, control, personalization, human oversight, failure recovery, and escalation.
• Establish customer-centered measures of usefulness, task success, quality, trust, adoption, and agent performance across connected AI-powered experiences.
• Conduct foundational and evaluative research across Salesforce’s in-person, virtual, and on-demand event experiences, including onsite observation, intercept interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
• Translate evidence into clear recommendations, strategic guidance, measurement frameworks, and future-state direction that shape digital strategies, experience roadmaps, requirements, and experiments.
• Create compelling narratives and data visualizations, present to audiences ranging from product teams to executives, and lead workshops that turn research findings into aligned decisions and follow-up actions.
• Advance research methods, reusable tools, measurement standards, and responsible uses of AI; mentor others, and champion inclusive and accessible research.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in qualitative research and strong fluency in quantitative methods, with excellent judgment about research questions, method selection, audience recruitment, evidence quality, and maintaining methodological rigor across research of varying scope and pace.
• Ability to plan, design, execute, analyze, and communicate foundational, generative, evaluative, and measurement research at both strategic and tactical levels.
• Comfortable conducting research in fast-paced, live event environments and are willing and able to travel approximately four to five times per year to support onsite research at Salesforce events.
• A record of proactively identifying high-value research opportunities and influencing product strategy, roadmaps, requirements, designs, and measurable business outcomes.
• Strong understanding of digital marketing experiences and the ability to connect research evidence to customer and employee needs, business goals, channel strategies, technical considerations, and potential implications across the broader digital portfolio.
• Working knowledge of basic statistical concepts and behavioral data, with the ability to interpret and integrate survey findings, digital analytics, and experimentation results alongside qualitative evidence while clearly communicating limitations.
• Demonstrated AI fluency and experience building AI-assisted research workflows, with sound judgment about where AI adds value, where human expertise is essential, and how to prevent speed or automation from distorting a finding.
• Strong facilitation, storytelling, and communication skills, with experience tailoring evidence and recommendations for product teams, cross-functional leaders, and executive audiences.
• Experience strengthening a research practice through mentoring, reusable frameworks, enablement and research knowledge systems.
• Ability to deliver high-quality work in a fast-moving environment with constrained timelines and collaborate effectively across globally distributed teams and time zones.
• A commitment to responsible, ethical, and inclusive research, particularly in rapidly evolving AI contexts.

Benefits

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