Principal Research Operations, Participant Strategy

Job Description:

Principal Research Operations, Participant Strategy

The Role

Are you passionate about shaping the future of UX research participant engagement? Do you believe the next generation of research will combine the strengths of human participants with advances in AI, agents, and synthetic users? Join our UX Research Operations team and help define how participant recruitment evolves in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

In this Principal-level individual contributor role, you will lead the strategy and execution of participant recruitment across both B2C and B2B research. You will serve as a subject matter expert on participant sourcing, panel management, and recruiting best practices while also helping establish our organization's approach to AI-enabled research methodologies.

Working closely with researchers, product teams, legal and compliance partners, and external vendors, you will develop scalable participant strategies, build and optimize research panels, and evaluate emerging capabilities such as AI agents and synthetic users. You will help determine when human participants are essential, when synthetic participants can accelerate learning, and how to responsibly integrate both into a modern research ecosystem.

This is a highly strategic role for someone who combines deep recruiting expertise with hands-on experience leveraging AI to solve complex operational and research challenges.

The Expertise and Skills You Bring

You are a participant recruitment and panel management expert with a decade or more of experience building scalable recruiting capabilities; and a practitioner of emerging AI methodologies who has personally built agents, experimented with synthetic users, and can help determine how research organizations should evolve in an AI-driven future, especially in a highly regulated industry.

You are a strategic thinker who thrives in ambiguity, influences through expertise rather than authority, and enjoys helping organizations prepare for the future.

Preferred Experience and Skills Include:

• 8-10 plus years of experience in participant recruitment, research operations, UX research, market research, or a related field
• Deep expertise recruiting both B2C and B2B participants, including enterprise decision-makers and specialized audiences
• Experience building, managing, and scaling participant panels, research communities, or participant databases
• Proven success developing recruiting strategies that support qualitative and quantitative research at scale
• Experience managing recruiting vendors, participant providers, and sourcing partnerships
• Hands-on experience building, configuring, or deploying AI agents to automate workflows or improve operational efficiency
• Experience creating, evaluating, or utilizing synthetic users, synthetic personas, or AI-generated participant models
• Strong understanding of the opportunities and limitations of synthetic research methodologies
• Experience developing frameworks for determining when human participants, synthetic participants, or hybrid approaches are most appropriate
• Familiarity with research and recruiting platforms such as User Interviews, UserTesting, dscout, Respondent, Qualtrics, and similar tools
• Strong communication, influence, and stakeholder management skills
• Experience working in highly regulated industries preferred