UX Researcher, Operations Tooling

Design at Waymo is about the total experience—not just how the product looks, but how it works, how it feels, and how we make our new technology accessible, approachable, and useful for everyone. We design the intuitive, delightful experience for our riders, and we also build the powerful, complex tools used by our fleet operations teams and the engineers who build the Waymo Driver. We are a highly multidisciplinary team of UX Designers, User and Market Researchers, UX Engineers, Content Designers, Industrial Designers, CAD Designers, Studio Engineers, and Technical Artists. We dig deep to understand the attitudes, emotions, and behaviors of all our users. This understanding serves as the foundation for everything we create.

This role follows a hybrid work schedule and will report to a Manager of Product & Customer Research.

You will:

• Lead fast-paced mixed-method research projects (alone or in small teams) end-to-end, with a focus on running studies on-the-ground (not in a UX lab setting), including interviewing, surfacing insights, and building presentations
• Collaborate closely with work partners from the UX Design team, PM, Ops, and Engineering
• Stay up-to-date on Product and Ops priorities within the Ops Tooling domain, helping to shape UXR project prioritization and scoping
• Build and maintain a deep understanding of the latest workflows and SOPs, immersing yourself in Waymo’s operations and developing empathy for users of operational tools in depots, workshops, and on the road

You have:

• Led fast-paced mixed method research projects by yourself or in small teams where you were on-the-ground running studies outside of a UX lab setting, interviewing participants, finding the salient insights, building visuals and presentation decks
• Extensive experience mapping operations or enterprise tooling workflows using frameworks such as critical user journeys or jobs to be done
• Launched tech products at an early stage where the company was in a fast learning cycle and working to scale rapidly
• Worked on a multi-touchpoint product/service offering that included a significant real-world physical element (i.e., not only a digital product or fully-online experience)
• Immersive and inclusive collaboration with key collaborators: UX design, UX writing, UX Eng, PM / TPM; you garner feedback along the lines of, ‘they are so fantastic to work with!’
• Experience managing research operations for your own studies, e.g., screening, recruiting, scheduling

We prefer:

• Experience with the operational implementation of autonomous driving technologies
• Experience partnering with research vendors and managing vendor relationships
• Experience with localizing products in a non-English speaking context
• Fluency in written and spoken Japanese

Travel:

• Travel to Waymo depot and remote monitoring locations to conduct field research will be required (Up to ~30% of the time, depending on project scopes)
• Travel for Waymo Insights Team offsites that are not in the Bay Area (1-2 times per year, 2-3 days each)