Research Operations Lead, Customer Insights

Description Join Salesforce's Customer Insights team, a core function within the marketing organization responsible for delivering objective, actionable insights that inform our marketing strategy and external narrative. As Research Operations Lead, you will make that team faster, sharper, and better organized using AI, automation, and process work as the primary levers. You will spend time with researchers understanding how work actually gets done, identify where AI or automation could create real leverage, and build solutions that get used. You will bring findings and proposals to the team lead for prioritization, then own the execution. This is a role for someone who sits at the intersection of research and operational improvement: research-credible enough to earn the trust of a team of seasoned researchers, and applied enough with AI and automation to build solutions they'll actually use. The measure of success is straightforward: the team works faster and smarter because of what you built. What You'll Do Diagnose Workflow Problems and Identify Opportunity: Spend time with researchers across quant and qual work to understand how projects actually run, where time gets lost, and where AI or automation could create meaningful leverage. Develop a point of view on priorities and bring proposals to team leadership with a recommendation, not just options. Build AI-Assisted Workflows: Target high-effort, repeatable research tasks: transcript analysis, survey programming and QA, crosstab generation, report drafting and assembly. Document what you build clearly enough that it does not depend on you to run. Automate Team Operations: Build lightweight automations that reduce operational friction across the team's core tools: Slack, Google Drive and GSuite, NotebookLM, Gemini, Outset.ai, Claude Code and SurveyMonkey. Target the places where work slows down unnecessarily: notification and routing logic, project intake, recurring task automation, and Drive organization. Maintain Research Credibility: Understand the research lifecycle well enough to spot where AI helps and where it quietly degrades quality. Be a trusted voice with researchers; people should feel comfortable telling you where things are broken. Know the difference between a workflow problem and a methodology problem. What We’re Looking For Research Foundation: A solid grounding in both quantitative and qualitative primary research, with meaningful experience in research operations. The researchers on this team are seasoned and you need to be credible to them from day one. They should see you as a peer who understands what good research looks like, not a vendor who has to be managed. Builder Capability: Genuine, applied experience using AI and automation to improve how a team operates. The bar is not familiarity with AI tools; it’s having identified a real workflow problem, built a solution, and gotten people to use it. You have shipped at least one automation or AI-assisted workflow that a team relies on regularly. Diagnostic Instincts: You know how to look for friction, develop recommendations rather than lists of possibilities, and care that researchers actually use what you build, not just that it is technically interesting. Clear Communication: Comfortable presenting workflow diagnoses and tool proposals to team leadership, translating between the operational and the practical. You can make a clear case for why something is worth building, and why researchers should change how they work. Comfort with Strategic Guidance: You can operate with direction rather than a detailed roadmap, and know when to elevate rather than push through alone. Nice to Have Familiarity with SurveyMonkey at a technical or admin level B2B tech or enterprise software research background Exposure to Salesforce products or ecosystem #J-18808-Ljbffr B Capital