DESCRIPTION

Come help shape the future of Alexa Skills, the voice experiences built for Amazon's cloud-based voice service Alexa. Alexa is the brain behind tens of millions of devices including the Echo family of devices, FireTV, Fire Tablet, and third-party devices with Alexa built-in. You'll research Alexa Skills (https://amazon.com/alexaskills) and help external developers create make skills for customers. Tens of thousands of developers have built skills using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK, https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples.

We're looking for a researcher to outline and execute studies to better understand our customers' needs and behaviors. The Alexa Skills Kit team has two customers: the skill developer and the end skill customers and so studies and insights need to serve both. Our end skill customers primarily interact with Alexa via voice, whereas our skill developers primarily interact with the ASK via our skill developer portal .

The Sr. User Experience Researcher is responsible for bringing customer insights into every phase of the product development process, ensuring we have the customer data we need to help developers build engaging skills. He/she is responsible for generating insights into how customers interact with skills so that our skill developers and internal teams can build more delightful skills.

Our research work ranges from formative to evaluative studies, field research to usability and lab studies. You should have broad skills in user research, product research, and design research methods and a thorough understanding of qualitative and quantitative research concepts. You will work closely with product managers, designers, engineers, marketing, and sales to understand and guide the team's research needs (known and unknown), including designing and conducting research activities. Your research will be agile, keeping pace with the rapid innovation in the team, but also making sure that we're keeping an eye on the big picture in understanding our customer groups.

Responsibilities
• Employ the best research method(s) based on research questions, timeline, and resourcing
• Ability to develop metrics that appropriately reflect the user experience quality of a feature, product or system
• Work closely with product, design, engineering, marketing, and sales teams to identify research topics and critical research questions, create detailed study plans and build a research roadmap; communicate and refresh on a regular basis to ensure impact and relevancy
• Communicate results and opportunities in clear, concise, and compelling ways to all levels of management
• Drive impact, as measured by changes to the product design and development roadmap
• Understand different data types from different sources and perform quick but thorough data analysis in order to create insightful and actionable findings
• Create a deep understanding and empathy for our target customers through primary field research, behavioral analysis, and/or secondary research
• Act as a representative within a larger Alexa user researcher community. Collect and synthesize useful research from across the organization, bringing insights back to your team
• Eagerness to continually learn, grow and improve the craft of UX research

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• BA/BS in experimental psychology, cognitive science, human computer interaction or related discipline
• End-to-end experience with all aspects of research (study design, recruiting, moderation, analysis, reporting)
• 5+ years of hands-on experience conducting UX research in an applied setting
• Working knowledge of behavioral statistics and the principles of experimental design
• A portfolio demonstrating past work experience, deliverables, and extraction of actionable insights from qualitative data

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• MA/MS/Ph.D. in experimental psychology, human computer interaction, anthropology, or related discipline
• The ability to manage ambiguity, work autonomously, keep organized, and multitask in an agile environment
• Excellent communication, presentation, interpersonal and analytical skills; the ability to communicate complex concepts clearly and persuasively across different audiences and varying levels of the organization
• Strong command of quantitative, behavioral analysis, and statistics
• A strong portfolio demonstrating past work experience and deliverables (e.g., study plans, reports)
• Demonstrated skill and creativity in selecting the right mix of methods to provide actionable insights to research questions and business goals, and the capacity to invent new methods when the right method does not exist
• The ability to understand, analyze and interpret complicated data
• Demonstrated thought-leadership with a passion for translating data into action
• Experience conducting research across a variety of countries, modalities and environments
• Experience working in technology, particularly with APIs, SDKs, and other tools for building software

Amazon is an Equal Opportunity Employer - Minority / Women / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation / Age