UX Researcher Lead

Lead UX Researcher

FedEx Dataworks

Role Overview

The Lead UX Researcher is responsible for planning, conducting, and communicating user research that informs product strategy and design decisions across the organization. This role partners closely with product designers, product managers, and engineering leaders to ensure user needs and behaviors are understood and represented in the products we build.

The Lead UX Researcher sets the standard for research quality, helps establish how research is integrated into product development, and serves as a consistent advocate for the user across cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Plan and conduct research. Lead generative, evaluative, and tactical UX research using the right methods for each question, including interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, surveys, and concept evaluation.
• Translate insight into action. Synthesize research findings into clear, actionable recommendations and communicate them effectively to designers, product managers, engineers, and leadership.
• Partner cross-functionally. Collaborate with product design, product management, engineering, and analytics partners to identify the right research questions, prioritize them, and feed insights into product decisions.
• Establish research standards. Define and maintain lightweight standards, templates, and a research repository that make insights discoverable and decisions defensible.
• Coach and enable others. Help product designers and other partners run well-scoped tactical research, and build broader research literacy across the team.
• Connect qualitative and quantitative. Partner with analytics and product to pair user insight with behavioral and product data, and contribute to baseline measures of how users interact with our products.
• Advocate for the user. Represent user needs across the product development process, particularly when priorities are competing and timelines are tight.
• Grow the practice. Contribute to the long-term vision for UX research at FedEx Dataworks, including how the practice scales as the organization invests in it.

Requirements

Context for this role

• The UX research function is being stood up at the ground level. The Lead UX Researcher will build the foundational practice, standards, and rituals while working as an integrated member of the product design team and partnering closely with designers on day-to-day work.
• The environment is fast-paced and carries significant ambiguity. Priorities shift, timelines are short, and the research practice itself is still being shaped.
• This role has visibility across product, design, engineering, and senior leadership. The ability to communicate clearly and confidently with varied audiences is essential.
• Our team is distributed across the US and Krakow, Poland. Comfort working asynchronously across time zones is important.

Required experience and skills

• Methodological range. Demonstrated experience across qualitative and quantitative research methods, with strong judgment on what to use when.
• Tooling fluency. Hands-on experience with Qualtrics, UserTesting, and UserZoom, including setting up studies, recruiting, and analysis.
• AI-forward practice. Practical experience using AI tools to support synthesis, secondary research, and reporting, with clear judgment about where AI helps and where human rigor is required.
• Founding-researcher mindset. Resourceful and self-directed. Energized by the opportunity to build a research practice from the ground up and shape how it integrates with product and design.
• Comfort with ambiguity. Able to bring structure to undefined problems and make defensible calls about where research has the highest leverage.
• Strong communication. Skilled at tailoring findings and recommendations to different audiences, from working teams to senior stakeholders.
• Coaching orientation. Comfortable teaching non-researchers to run solid, ethical research and setting the guardrails that keep quality high.
• Ownership and initiative. Sets direction, advocates for the discipline, and earns trust through how they show up rather than waiting for permission.

Nice to have

• Experience instrumenting and interpreting product behavior data using tools such as Glassbox, Amplitude, FullStory, Pendo, or similar.
• Experience establishing baseline UX and behavioral metrics for a platform or product.
• Background working in logistics, supply chain, or other operationally complex enterprise domains.
• Experience partnering with design systems and platform teams.
• Experience collaborating with distributed teams across multiple time zones.

This position is eligible for remote work and may be located anywhere within the United States excluding AK, HI and U.S. territories, however if you live within the 50 miles radius of a campus you will be required to work at a FedEx campus location several times per week.

USA: $8,007.29/mo - $18,149.85/mo, CO: $8,007.29/mo - $17,393.61/mo, CA: $8,452.14/mo - $14,413.11/mo, NJ: $8,452.14/mo - $13,523.42/mo, OH & VT: $8,452.14/mo - $14,368.63/mo, MN: $8,452.14/mo - $16,637.36/mo, IL & NV: $8,452.14/mo - $17,393.61/mo, MD, NY & WA: $8,452.14/mo - $18,149.85/mo, MA: $8,896.99/mo - $18,149.85/mo, RI: $9,786.68/mo - $16,637.36/mo, CT: $9,786.68/mo - $17,393.61/mo, DC & HI: $10,231.53/mo - $17,393.61/mo, NYC: $10,231.53/mo - $18,149.85/mo

Preferred Qualifications:  

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FedEx Dataworks is an Equal Opportunity Employer including, Vets/Disability.

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Dataworks does not discriminate against qualified individuals with disabilities in regard to job application procedures, hiring, and other terms and conditions of employment. Further, Dataworks is prepared to make reasonable accommodations for the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified applicant or employee to enable the applicant or employee to be considered for the desired position, to perform the essential functions of the position in question, or to enjoy equal benefits and privileges of employment as are enjoyed by other similarly situated employees without disabilities, unless the accommodation will impose an undue hardship. If a reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact View email address on jobs.institutedata.com.