Job Description

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!

The Opportunity

"As a Sr. Director of UX Research you will lead and scale our user research function across a portfolio of complex and highly specialized B2B SaaS products. You will have the opportunity to build a culture of research and take the UX practice to the next level. Your impact will range from shaping feature-level interactions to steering product roadmap ends through evidence-based UX strategy. This is a perfect role for a senior research practitioner who thrives on building from the ground up and is comfortable owning both the strategic direction of a practice and the delivery of world-class, high-quality insights through hands-on work." - VP, Product Design

What You’ll Contribute 

Act as the primary UX research lead across multiple product teams, directly planning and executing complex generative and evaluative research studies.

Partner with product design, product management, and engineering to embed customer empathy into our product development process, from discovery through launch.

Build and scale user research operations: including participant recruitment processes, consent/data privacy guidelines, tooling, and insight repositories.

Produce actionable, synthesized research outputs, personas, journey maps, opportunity frameworks, UX scorecards, etc. that influence product decisions.

Define, track, and report UX metrics, usability benchmarks, and customer sentiment over time (in collaboration with data and analytics partners).

Coach and mentor research teammates while maintaining personal involvement in key studies, ranging from 1:1 interviews and usability studies to multi-phase discovery research.

Develop a roadmap for growing UX research as a practice and discipline horizontally across the organization.

Evangelize the value of UX research to executive, product, and engineering stakeholders; create research education programs, playbooks, and onboarding experiences.

Establish and scale research rituals and templates, study briefs, session guides, findings formats, presentation frameworks; to empower reproducible, high-quality work.

Be a visible and credible voice for customer-centered thinking within FICO, in product planning meetings, quarterly roadmap reviews, and functional team ceremonies.

Partner with other UX leaders to influence the overall design-maturity model for FICO’s design and delivery ecosystem.

What We’re Seeking

12+ years of progressive experience in user research for digital products, including 5+ years in a leadership or player-coach capacity.

Proven track record of executing hands-on generative and evaluative user research for B2B, enterprise, or technically complex software platforms.

Experience building or scaling a research practice in a SaaS or product-led organization.

Excellent working knowledge of UX research tools and methodologies across qualitative and quantitative methods (interviews, surveys, usability, card sorting, heuristic reviews, benchmarking).

Portfolio or examples of past research work and impact, showing your ability to translate findings into meaningful product change.

High comfort level with complex information architectures, data-driven interfaces, and research in highly regulated or secure industries.

Proven people management and coaching skills, including hiring and developing early-in-career talent.

Experience conducting research for fintech, fraud detection, analytics, or AI/ML-based software platforms.

Strong storytelling chops backed by data and skilled in turning synthesis into narratives that influence action at both strategy and feature levels.

Bachelor/Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Design Research, Anthropology, or a related field. A Master’s or PhD in a relevant field is strongly preferred. 

Our Offer to You

An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values:  Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.

The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.

Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.

An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

The targeted base pay range for this role is: $151,000 to $236,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.
 

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