Staff UX Researcher

Staff UX Researcher

The Coca-Cola Company is building a modern product organization for a business that operates at extraordinary scale. Our ambition is not simply to digitize existing work. We are building the products, platforms, and intelligent capabilities that will shape how we serve customers, accelerate growth, and operate in the future.

That means designing products that help customers do business with us more seamlessly, give sales and service teams better insight and decision support, and connect the workflows and data behind a complex operating system. The work spans customer experience, service enablement, sales experience, operations, and growth — with opportunities to build entirely new capabilities in areas like personalization, automation, AI-assisted workflows, and decision intelligence.

We're bringing together Product, Engineering, Design, and Data in small, empowered teams with ownership from discovery through delivery and iteration. Design and research are central to this shift, helping teams understand how people actually work, simplify complex systems, and create experiences that are coherent, useful, and built for impact.

This is a chance to help define what great product design looks like inside one of the world's most iconic brands: deeply practical, beautifully crafted, and built for a business where digital and the physical world meet every day.

What You Will Work On

A Staff UX Researcher at The Coca-Cola Company operates across product areas, not just within one. Your scope will span:

• Digital enterprise and consumer experiences across our global brand portfolio
• Sales, service, and operational tools used by the teams who run the business day to day
• The design system and shared experience frameworks that give our products coherence at scale
• AI-enabled and intelligent product experiences as we integrate emerging capabilities across our platform
• The design practice itself: how we work, how we grow designers, and how we earn influence across the organization

You will not be heads-down on a single product area. You will be the connective tissue across teams, the person who sees the whole board and makes the right calls about where design needs to go next.

Responsibilities

Organizational Research Strategy

• Define research strategy across multiple product areas, identifying the highest-leverage questions for the organization and sequencing work to build cumulative understanding over time
• Connect research investments directly to business outcomes and strategic priorities, operating at the level of portfolio decisions, not just individual product cycles
• Present findings and recommendations to senior and executive leadership with clarity, confidence and well-reasoned rationale that moves decision-makers to act
• Shape how Coca-Cola thinks about user-centricity at an organizational level, not just within the boundaries of a team or product

Discovery and Insight at Scale

• Apply a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methods to uncover user needs, behaviors, and mental models across diverse user populations and product contexts
• Use AI-powered synthesis tools and modern research methodologies to analyze, theme, and surface insight faster without sacrificing rigor or judgment
• Design research programs that serve multiple product teams simultaneously, multiplying your impact well beyond any single squad or initiative. Specifically, you will develop frameworks, systems and toolkits that allow cross-functional teams to execute team-level research and ensure insight-loops exist across teams for continuity and clarity.
• Partner with designers and product managers during discovery to frame problems before solutions take shape, and ensure insight drives direction from the start

Thought Partnership and Strategic Influence

• Serve as a trusted strategic advisor to cross-functional leaders across the organization - shaping decisions before they are made and providing insights that connect the opportunities across teams for greater impact.
• Build strong, durable working relationships across Product, Design, Engineering, and Data Analytics and cultivate genuine alignment of qual and quant as a strategic differentiator for our business.
• Influence product roadmaps, investment priorities, and organizational direction using the weight of accumulated, well-communicated insight

Research Practice Ownership

• Take ownership of how UX research works at Coca-Cola - defining methods, standards, and ways of working that scale across the organization
• Identify structural gaps in research capability and drive initiatives to close them, whether through tooling, process, hiring, or enablement
• Mentor researchers and cross-functional teams, elevating research literacy and user-centricity across the broader product organization
• Proactively identify and pursue opportunities to expand the reach, influence, and impact of a strategic UX research discipline.

What We Are Looking For

Required

• 10+ years of UX research experience, with a demonstrated track record of influencing product strategy and organizational direction across multiple teams or business areas.
• Deep proficiency across modern qualitative and quantitative methods: interviews, usability studies, contextual inquiry, diary studies, concept testing, and the judgment to know when each applies.
• Hands-on experience using AI-powered research and synthesis tools to accelerate insight generation and scale research impact without losing rigor.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a strategic thought partner to senior and executive product and design leaders - shaping decisions, not just delivering findings.
• Comfort bringing quantitative approaches alongside data analysts to triangulate findings and build a complete picture of E2E experiences.
• Exceptional ability to communicate complex research to varied audiences, including executives, through clear, compelling storytelling that drives action.
• Proven ability to operate independently and lead through ambiguity in fast-moving, complex product environments.
• Established at dual-track prioritization for key initiatives and rigorous craft that drives business and user outcomes.
• Experience building or substantially shaping a research practice, not just executing within an established one.

Preferred Experience

• CPG, retail, or enterprise products that span multiple user roles and touchpoints
• Complex operational or workflow tools, not just consumer-facing digital products
• Research involving AI-enabled or intelligent product experiences
• Leading or mentoring a team of researchers, or formally contributing to research hiring and development
• Speaking-engagements, panels and demonstrated thought leadership experience related to product research transformation.

Core Skills

• Research Strategy: You define the right questions at an organizational level, sequence work to build cumulative understanding across teams and time and connect research investments to business outcomes.
• AI-Augmented Synthesis: You know how to use AI tools to analyze, theme, and deliver insight at speed - without letting automation replace rigor, nuance, or judgment.
• Thought Partnership: You show up as a strategic partner to product and design leadership, shaping decisions before they are made and maintaining influence across multiple teams simultaneously.
• Insight Communication: You translate nuanced, complex findings into clear, compelling narratives that move senior and executive audiences to act.
• Systems Thinking: You connect what you learn from users to broader product strategy, business context, and organizational priorities — across teams and domains, not just within one.
• Organizational Influence: You build relationships, credibility, and communication habits that let research shape strategy at an organizational level - not just within a single product area.
• Practice Ownership: You take responsibility for how research works at Coca-Cola - not just contributing to it, but defining, improving, and scaling it over time. You build systems that allow you to scale yourself and your impact.
• Mentorship and Capability Building: You make the people around you meaningfully better at research, and you raise the bar for user-centricity across the organization as a whole.

Compensation and Location

Generous base salary and annual incentive; comprehensive benefits package including health, dental, and vision coverage; 401(k) with company match as well as a company-funded pension plan; generous paid time off, and access to the kind of perks that come with working at one of the world's most beloved consumer brands.

This role is based at The Coca-Cola Company's global headquarters in Atlanta, GA. We work a hybrid schedule of three days per week in office, designed to build the highly cohesive, collaborative team culture we are intentionally creating. Relocation assistance is available for candidates outside of our local area who are open to making Atlanta home. Atlanta is a city on the rise, with a growing tech and creative scene, a relatively low cost of living compared to coastal markets, and The Coca-Cola Company at the center of