There’s a moment every September.

The kids go back to school. The vacations end. The inbox settles just enough. And you sit down at your desk — or your kitchen table, or wherever it is you work — and you look at your life.

Not with dread, necessarily. Sometimes with something sharper. A kind of clarity that summer, in all its beautiful scatteredness, doesn’t usually allow.

And you think: okay. Now what?

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot lately. I think it’s one of the most honest moments of the year. Before the holidays eat everything, before Q4 demands everything else, there’s this small window in early fall where something in you asks the real question.

Not “what’s my next role.” Not “how do I update my LinkedIn.”

The real question.

Am I building a life I actually want?

I built something for people who are ready to sit with that question instead of flinching away from it.

It’s called Trust Your Signal.

Six-session group coaching series. Starts September 9th, runs every Wednesday through October 14th at 5:00 pm PST. Ten people. $400 for the full series.

Here’s what actually happens inside it.

We spend the first session on something most professional development skips entirely: you. Not your experience or your title or your five-year plan. You. What do you actually value — not what looks good on paper, not what your parents hoped for, not what made sense when you were someone slightly younger and slightly less worn down by the gap between where you are and where you thought you’d be. What would you fight for? What could you not live without?

Most people have never answered that with full honesty. The ones who have know how different everything looks after.

Session two, we go after the inner critic. That voice that tells you you’re not ready, not quite right for the room, not enough of whatever the room seems to want. Here’s what I know about that voice: it’s not yours. It borrowed itself from somewhere — a parent, a manager, a moment you’ve been carrying without realizing it’s still with you. We name it. We look at it directly. Named things lose most of their power.

Session three is about balance — which is not, I promise you, about color-coded systems or morning routines. It’s honest accounting of your whole life: work, health, relationships, joy, meaning. Where is your energy actually going? What is that costing you? What needs to change?

Session four is the one that requires the most courage. We ask: whose dream are you living? How much of the path you’re on right now did you actually choose — not just accept, or inherit, or drift into because it seemed reasonable at the time? The answer, when you really look, is usually smaller than people expect. That’s not a failure. It’s information. The most useful kind.

Session five is about the gap. That space between where you are and where you want to be isn’t empty. There’s something specific inside it: fear, usually. An old story you’ve been treating as fact. A belief about what you’re allowed to want. We find it. We name it. It shrinks.

Session six is the plan. Not a list of tactics you found on the internet. A plan built from what you now actually know about yourself — your values, your real constraints, your real desires. You leave with a 30-day commitment you’ll keep because it came from you instead of from someone else’s framework.

That’s what you leave with.

Two things I want to be honest about.

First: this is a relaunch. I built this program for a summer cohort. People told me summer wasn’t the right time — too scattered, not enough stillness for this kind of work. They were right. I moved it. Fall is the time to refocus and recalibrate, and I should have known that from the start.

Second: the price. $400 is not a teaser rate or an introductory offer. It’s the real price. I believe the kind of coaching that changes how you see yourself shouldn’t require you to already be standing on solid ground. This is my attempt at that.

If you’ve been reading this and something in you has been quietly saying yes — that’s the signal. That’s what this whole program is named for.

There are ten spots. This email goes to everyone who’s been following this work, and some of you have been waiting since the first time I mentioned it. If that’s you, don’t wait.

Reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Tell me a little about where you are right now. I’ll respond within 24 hours.

Fall is the time to refocus and recalibrate.

This fall, do something for yourself.

— Liz

Trust Your Signal | Six sessions | Ten people | $400 | Wednesdays 5pm PST | September 9 through October 14, 2026

I bring this up because I hear a version of this anxiety constantly from the researchers I coach. They apply to a role, refresh the page a few days later, and the listing looks slightly different, or it’s gone, or the apply button routes somewhere new. The instinct is to read that as a signal about them: did I mess up the application, did they already fill it, was I too late. Almost always, it’s just infrastructure. Companies move job posts around for reasons that have nothing to do with the candidate on the other end of the browser.

The deeper coaching point is about where you put your attention during a search. You can’t control when a company reshuffles its Ashby board or reposts a role under a cleaner URL. What you can control is whether your materials are ready to go the moment you notice a listing, and whether you’re tracking your own outreach closely enough that a shifted link doesn’t throw you off your rhythm. Build the system so the noise in the process doesn’t become noise in your head.

This week’s list reflects that same instability in a couple of spots, but everything below is now fully confirmed and ready.

36 roles confirmed. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

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The List

New this week

Notion — Market Researcher 🆕 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Notion has been building out its research bench for months, but this is the company’s first dedicated market research seat rather than a product or growth research role. It’s a sign the company wants a formal read on customer experiences, attitudes, and needs feeding into strategy, not just product decisions. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Researcher, Brand 🆕 📍 San Francisco, CA or New York, NY (check posting for exact arrangement) This sits on OpenAI’s Marketing Insights & Analytics team, which exists to understand audiences, behaviors, and attitudes and translate that into outreach and product strategy. It’s the second market research hire OpenAI has posted this year, after the Market Research Lead role, which suggests this is becoming a real function inside the company rather than a single seat. 👉 Apply directly here

Continuing roles

Superhuman (Grammarly) — Staff User Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Now part of Grammarly’s AI productivity suite, this role leads foundational research for the cross-product AI agent called Go. 👉 Apply directly here

Superhuman (Grammarly) — Senior User Researcher, Agents 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) The second open research seat on the same Agents team as the Staff role above, which points to a team being built out rather than a single hire. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, AI Evaluations 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Focused on evaluating how Notion’s AI features actually perform for real users, not just in internal testing. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K-$200K Shapes growth-related product decisions with insights that feed directly into Notion’s AI experiences. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) General researcher seat at a company that requires in-office presence on Mondays and Thursdays. Note: this posting moved to a new URL this week, listed below. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Applied Data Science & Insights Leader, GTM Intelligence 📍 San Francisco, CA (Full time, on-site) Leans data science and analytics rather than classic UXR, flagging clearly. Liz confirmed this one directly. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Brings quantitative rigor to how OpenAI understands user behavior at scale. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher, Product Policy 📍 San Francisco, CA | 💰 $310K-$393K An early member of the Measurement team within Product Policy, helping build a data-driven culture around policy decisions. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Manager, Customer Insights 📍 Remote, US, Canada, or UK Owns the Customer Insights product area end to end, turning raw usage data into narratives that inform Mural’s roadmap. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 Remote, Canada only Designs the experiences that help admins and buyers understand the value of collaboration inside Mural. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Staff UX Product Researcher, Route Discovery & Navigation 📍 Berlin, DE (Full time) Focused on how athletes find and navigate routes, one of Strava’s most heavily used feature areas. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Lead Marketing Analyst 📍 New York, NY (Hybrid) Sits on the Marketing Analytics team, measuring performance against brand awareness and growth goals. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior Marketing Analyst (Contract) ⚠️ Contract, not FTE 📍 Remote, California or New York A contract seat on the same Marketing Analytics team, flagged clearly since it’s not a full-time role. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior UX/Product Researcher, User Lifecycle 📍 Check posting Part of Strava’s Research & Insights team, focused on how athletes move through the product over time. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Staff UX/Product Researcher 📍 Check posting A general staff-level opening on the Research & Insights team, distinct from the Route Discovery role above. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior UX/Product Researcher, Progress Tracking & User Engagement 📍 Check posting Strava’s sixth open research role across the Research & Insights team, a sign of real investment in the function. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research (Melbourne) 📍 Melbourne, AU or Remote Leads and grows the Design Research team, building research capability and consistent standards across evaluative and generative methods. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research (Sydney) 📍 Sydney, AU or Remote Same leadership mandate as the Melbourne posting above, based out of Canva’s flagship campus. 👉 Apply directly here

Cohere — Staff UX Researcher 📍 Toronto, London, or New York, NY A staff-level seat at one of the more research-forward frontier AI labs. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE (Hybrid, 2 days/week) Joins a young UX research team applying discovery through evaluative methods across the rider logistics experience. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Plans, conducts, and synthesizes research across the full product lifecycle, working closely with design, product, and data. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior/Staff UX Researcher (Vendor) 📍 Berlin, Germany Confirmed open again this week; Liz confirmed the link directly. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA | 💰 $120K-$125K Leads customer-facing engagements on the Professional Services team, helping strategic accounts get more out of FullStory’s platform. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst, EMEA 📍 Remote, London area (up to 25% travel) Same mandate as the Atlanta role, covering the EMEA region. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA (in-office 1 day/week) A more junior seat on the same Professional Services team. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Still Lovable’s first-ever UXR hire, shaping how research gets built into the company from the ground up. 👉 Apply directly here

Replit — Senior Consumer Insights Research Manager 📍 Foster City, CA (Hybrid, in-office 3 days a week) Replit’s first-ever consumer insights hire, reporting to the Head of Consumer and Brand Marketing. Liz confirmed this one directly. 👉 Apply directly here

Cursor — User Researcher 📍 Check posting Cursor’s first-ever UXR hire, leading studies across different user segments, workflows, and levels of expertise. 👉 Apply directly here

Character.AI — UX Researcher 📍 Check posting Still Character.AI’s first-ever UXR hire. 👉 Apply directly here

Ramp — UX Researcher 📍 Check posting Ramp’s first-ever UXR hire in fintech, a category where research maturity varies widely. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — UXR Operations Lead, AI 📍 San Francisco, CA Reports to the Head of User Research, building out the operational backbone for Harvey’s growing research org. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — Head of UX Research 📍 Remote-eligible A team-building leadership role, part of what looks like an ongoing restructure of Harvey’s research org. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — Senior/Staff User Researcher 📍 New York, NY (Full time) This posting shifted IDs a few times this week before landing here. Liz confirmed this is the live link. 👉 Apply directly here

Synthesia — UX Researcher (Senior/Staff-level) 📍 London, UK (Hybrid, near Great Portland Street) Synthesia’s first-ever full-time UX researcher, at a company that recently raised $200M at a $4B valuation. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

The crawler pulls roles from company career boards directly, before they get syndicated to LinkedIn or Indeed, which is where most researchers are competing for attention against hundreds of other applicants. I verify every link before it reaches you, including a second pass this week matching exact posting titles and IDs rather than relying on a single automated check. If an apply button is broken or the role looks filled, it doesn’t make the list, or it gets flagged clearly like the ones above.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals, and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

Next week I’m watching for whether this week’s market research pattern at Notion and OpenAI shows up anywhere else, everything on this week’s list is fully confirmed.

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And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated, that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

This week’s list has three of those moments. Synthesia, a London-based AI video company now valued at four billion dollars, is hiring its first-ever full-time UX researcher. Harvey posted not one but two senior research leadership roles the same week its earlier research operations posting went quiet, which usually means a team is being rebuilt, not shrunk. And if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you’ll recognize the pattern from Lovable, Cursor, Character.AI and Ramp over the past month. AI-native companies are hitting the point where craft and instinct stop scaling, and they’re reaching for research to fill the gap.

If you’re on the job market right now, this matters more than it might seem. A “first research hire” role is a different kind of job than joining an established team of twelve. You’ll have more latitude and less scaffolding. You’ll be building the panel, the repository, the researcher’s seat at the table, all at once, often while also doing the studies. Some people find that thrilling. Others find it exhausting by month four. Neither reaction is wrong, but you should know which one you are before you say yes, because the interview process for these roles rarely tells you honestly what the first six months will feel like.

The way to find out is to ask the hiring manager directly what happens to research findings today, before you existed. Who makes decisions without you right now, and what are they using instead of you. Their answer tells you whether you’re walking into genuine appetite for research or a decorative title that will get deprioritized the first time a launch date is tight. I ask candidates in coaching sessions to write that question down before every first-hire interview, because it’s the one most people forget to ask when they’re excited about being wanted.

32 confirmed roles this week. I’ll say plainly that several of them needed extra digging rather than a clean automated check, since the tool I use to verify hit a network snag this morning — and two roles from last week’s list didn’t survive: Delivery Hero’s Vendor researcher role in Berlin has closed, and Harvey’s Head of Research Community and Operations appears to have been folded into the two new research leadership roles they posted this same week. Every apply button on the confirmed roles was tested by hand. The three pending are marked clearly at the top so you know exactly where things stand before you spend your morning applying.

The List

Synthesia — UX Researcher (Senior/Staff-level) 🆕 📍 London, UK (Hybrid, near Great Portland Street) Synthesia makes AI video generation tools and just closed a $200M Series E at a $4B valuation. This is their first full-time UX researcher, and you’d own research end-to-end across the whole product portfolio, including a new real-time agentic product, with nobody else’s process to inherit or unlearn. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — Head of UX Research 🆕 📍 Remote-eligible Harvey builds AI tools for legal and professional services and has scaled past 1,000 clients in 60+ countries. This is a team-building leadership role: you’d hire and mentor a research org from a small base and design the mixed-methods program across discovery, evaluative, and longitudinal work. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — Staff UX Researcher 🆕 📍 A second Harvey research role posted the same week as the Head of UX Research opening above. Likely one of the first hires reporting into that new leader, so if you apply to both, it’s worth naming that in your note. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior UX/Product Researcher, Progress Tracking & User Engagement 🆕 📍 Strava now has five open research roles across its Research & Insights team, and this one owns the end-to-end research program for the features that keep 180 million athletes coming back day after day, including some of Strava’s newer AI-generated features. 👉 Apply directly here

Replit — Senior Consumer Insights Research Manager 📍 Foster City, CA (Hybrid) Replit’s first-ever consumer insights hire, now in its third week on the list without filling. The AI coding platform has over 100 million users and is still building this capability from scratch. High ownership, broad scope across consumer and brand, hybrid in Foster City. The search has been deliberate, which tends to mean the bar is real. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, AI Evaluations 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Defining what “good” looks like for Notion’s AI features, not just model output quality but the full experience of delegating work to an agent and trusting its results. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Focused on how people discover and adopt Notion’s AI features like Agent and Chat across very different use cases. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) | 💰 $160K-$200K Mixed-methods research on adoption and monetization as AI features increasingly touch onboarding and workspace creation. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Leans marketing analytics, shaping outreach strategy and thought leadership through market and audience understanding rather than product usability work. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Designing quantitative research across the full product lifecycle on a small team sitting at the intersection of users, product, and safety. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher, Product Policy 📍 San Francisco, CA An early seat on the Measurement team within Product Policy, using data on user behavior and expectations to shape policy priorities and north star metrics. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — UXR Operations Lead, AI 📍 San Francisco, CA Reports to the Head of User Research and builds the systems, rolling research program, and operational backbone that let a growing research team run well. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Manager, Customer Insights 📍 Remote, US, Canada, or UK A PM role with customer insights at its center, turning product data into the narratives that prove collaboration’s ROI to enterprise buyers. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 Remote, Canada only Designs the user-facing side of Mural’s Customer Insights product area, including its early point of view on AI-native insights. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Staff UX Product Researcher, Route Discovery & Navigation 📍 Berlin, DE Owns the end-to-end research program for how athletes find and navigate routes. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior UX/Product Researcher, User Lifecycle 📍 Research across the full arc of a Strava user’s relationship with the app, from first open to long-term retention. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Staff UX/Product Researcher 📍 A general staff-level research opening distinct from the Route Discovery and User Lifecycle roles above. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior Marketing Analyst (Contract) ⚠️ contract, not FTE 📍 Remote, California or New York Measures paid and organic marketing performance against brand awareness and subscription growth. Contract role, flagged clearly for anyone specifically looking for full-time. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Lead Marketing Analyst ⚠️ leans analytical 📍 New York, NY (Hybrid) Analytics-heavy role on the Marketing Analytics team, flagged here because it leans more quantitative marketing than classic UXR, but relevant enough to include. 👉 Apply directly here

Cohere — Staff UX Researcher 📍 Toronto, London, or New York, NY Equips Cohere’s forward-deployed engineering team with the tools to turn customer engagements into structured, product-relevant insight. 👉 Apply directly here

Cursor — User Researcher 📍 First-ever UXR hire at Cursor. You’d help the team understand how developers actually use the product across skill levels and workflows, and build the research function’s early systems and rituals. 👉 Apply directly here

Character.AI — UX Researcher 📍 First-ever UXR hire at Character.AI, joining a company that sits at an unusually intimate edge of AI product design: conversational companionship at scale. 👉 Apply directly here

Ramp — UX Researcher 📍 First-ever UXR hire at this fintech, which has grown fast on the strength of design and instinct alone. That ceiling is exactly why the role now exists. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE First-ever UXR hire at Lovable, which lets anyone build software using natural language. You’d design studies and prototype new AI-assisted ways of learning from users on a completely blank slate. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Remote, US (up to 25% travel) | 💰 $120K-$125K Professional Services role leading customer-facing technical and analytical engagements for strategic accounts. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst, EMEA 📍 Remote, London area (up to 25% travel) Same Customer Insights Analyst role, scoped to FullStory’s EMEA accounts. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA (in-office 1 day/week) The individual-contributor entry point into FullStory’s Customer Insights practice. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research (Melbourne) 📍 Melbourne, AU (or Remote) Leads evaluative research across Canva’s product suite and shapes how the Design Research sub-specialty adopts AI-assisted methods. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research (Sydney) 📍 Sydney, AU (or Remote) The same Head of Design Research mandate, posted in parallel out of Canva’s Sydney office. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Customer Insights Analyst 🌍 Philippines 📍 Makati, Philippines (Hybrid) Turns qualitative and quantitative feedback from support tickets, social media, and in-product surveys into action for Canva’s Teams and Education product area. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, Germany Research for the rider-facing side of Delivery Hero’s logistics platform. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 🌍 Riyadh 📍 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Research across HungerStation and the wider MENA region. Arabic proficiency required — flagging that upfront. Part of Delivery Hero’s 70+ country footprint. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

Most of this list never touches a public job board search. It lives inside company ATS platforms like Ashby and SmartRecruiters, visible only if you know to look at each company’s board directly, hence I define them as “under-the-radar.” I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list, and if I can’t confirm a role cleanly, I tell you that plainly instead of guessing.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals, and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

Next post I’ll follow up on whether Harvey’s two new research leadership roles start attracting applications and whether the three roles pending manual confirmation this week resolve cleanly. The Delivery Hero Vendor role in Berlin closed this week — worth watching whether they repost it.

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated, that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

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One of my clients just got an impressive job offer from a company that people would do anything to work for, and yet they couldn’t shake an overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety. It got me thinking about why what seemed like a huge win on paper was creating so much dissonance? I realized that they weren’t actually weighing the job; they were weighing the reaction to the job; Would it impress people? Would it make their family proud? But what was lurking underneath the surface was my client’s fear that their Monday mornings would be miserable.

That was the moment I started to consider the ruler people use.

Every decision gets measured against something

We like to imagine that big decisions are made through some deliberate process; ie. pros and cons lists, long thoughtful walks, a trusted gut feeling. But underneath all of that reasoning there’s always a ruler, some set of units we’ve internalized as evidence we’re doing the right thing. And most of us are measuring in units we inherited, not ones we intentionally chose for ourselves.

How much it pays. How it reads on LinkedIn. Whether it sounds impressive at dinner. Whether it’s the kind of thing “successful” people do. These feel like facts, but they’re not. They’re a ruler, built almost entirely out of other people’s perspectives. Money is a substitute for security. Prestige is a stand-in for other people’s approval. “How will this look” isn’t really about how it feels, but about how it appears to someone on the outside.

To be clear, I don’t think any of this makes us shallow. Money matters. Reputation has consequences you can’t wave away. But these are units built to make comparisons easy… exactly what makes them so tempting to reach for. Nobody questions you for chasing them. Try telling your family you turned down the promotion because it didn’t fill your soul and watch the room go quiet.

A different ruler

But, what if the problem was never the decision itself, but the units we use to measure it?

Picture the same job offer, held up to a different scale. Not how much it pays, but how alive you’d feel doing it on an ordinary Wednesday. Not how impressive the title sounds, but whether taking it would allow you to recognize your true self in it. Not whether people would be proud of you, but whether you’d be proud of yourself in the quiet version of your life when no one else is around. Will this role bring you authentic joy on a daily basis and is the work something you could sustain for years without it burning you out. Balance. A sense of purpose. Difficult to put into words but oh so obvious when they’re missing.

These aren’t softer metrics than money or prestige. They’re just harder to demonstrate. And that, more than anything, is probably why we reach for the others. Status is easy to show off. A feeling of aliveness on a Tuesday is not resume material.

Where it gets tricky

Here’s the part I almost left out, because it complicates the tidy version of this essay. Values language gets borrowed and worn just as easily as status language does. Authenticity has become a personal brand. Joy is sold to us in a candle. Plenty of people chase purpose with the exact same competitive, comparison-hungry energy they used to chase a corner office, just with softer framing. Renaming your ruler from prestige to purpose doesn’t automatically mean you’re measuring anything more authentic.

So, the real question isn’t only which metric you use. It’s whether you’ve ever stopped to ask if the metric was yours to begin with, or if it’s just a costume you put on at some point and never took off. That’s a test almost nobody runs, no matter which ruler they’re holding.

The Decision Ruler

A practice that I’ve started using with my clients: before they let any metric have weight on a big decision, whether it’s money, prestige, joy, or purpose, I ask them to sit with two questions.

First, whose voice is this… really? Close your eyes and trace each metric to its origin. Did you arrive at “I feel proud of my title” sitting alone with yourself, or is that your father’s voice, a roommate’s Instagram caption, or just the version of success that was in the air when you were twenty two and soaking it in without noticing? A borrowed metric can still be worth honoring. But it’s worth naming it before you build a life around it.

Second, what is the metric’s track record? Think back to the last time you chased this exact thing, whether it was the money or the prestige or joy. What did it actually give you? Something that lasted, or something that faded when congratulations stopped rolling in? A metric that let you down doesn’t deserve another turn just because it’s familiar.

Give each metric you’re using a rating from one to five on both questions. Is it truly yours?, and has it actually paid off? The ones that score low on both scales are unlikely to be serving you, not because they’re evil, but because they’re borrowed and unproven. The metrics that score high on both, the ones that are genuinely yours and have actually delivered before, those are your real ruler. Everything else is just furniture someone else picked out that you’ve been arranging your life around.

In 2026, the barriers that once separated “people who build things” from “people who don’t” have collapsed in ways that are genuinely new. The tools exist now — AI assistants, large language models, no-code platforms, automation frameworks — that allow someone with zero technical background to go from “I see a problem” to “I built something that solves it.” Not metaphorically. Actually.

What that means is that being a builder today is less about what you know how to make and more about how you think. And that’s a much more accessible threshold than most people realize.

What “builder” actually means now

The old definition of builder was skills-first: you had the technical ability, therefore you could build. The new definition is problem-first: you see a gap clearly enough, and care about it enough, to figure out the rest.

This is a meaningful shift. Because the people who see problems most clearly aren’t always the developers. They’re the practitioners, the people living and working inside a field, watching the same friction points repeat, accumulating domain knowledge that no outsider would have.

A UX researcher who has spent 15 years understanding how hiring works sees things a recruiter or a software developer doesn’t. A teacher who has spent a decade in underfunded classrooms sees things an EdTech founder doesn’t. A coach who has spent years in the corner of people navigating painful career transitions sees things a job board product manager doesn’t.

That knowledge — hard-won, specific, rooted in real experience — is the most valuable input in building something useful. And for the first time, it doesn’t have to stay locked inside someone who can’t also execute on it.

Why now is different

The honest answer is: AI changed the math.

Not because AI does the building for you. It doesn’t. But because AI dramatically lowers the cost of learning enough to get started. You no longer need to know how something works before you build it, you need to be able to describe what you want clearly enough that you can learn as you go, ask good questions, understand the answers well enough to act on them, and debug when things break.

That’s a different skill set than traditional software development. It’s closer to research. To communication. To clear thinking about what a system should do and why. Many of the people who have been told for years that building “isn’t for them” are actually well-equipped for exactly this kind of work.

The technical vocabulary is learnable, faster than you think. What you need coming in is the problem, the clarity about why it matters, and the willingness to feel incompetent for a while.

How to approach it

Start with the problem, not the solution. Before you touch any tool, write down exactly what the gap is. Who has it. What a solution would need to do. What “good enough” looks like. The more precisely you can describe the problem, the more useful everything that follows will be.

Treat your domain expertise as the asset. The technical side is scaffolding. What you know about the problem — the nuance, the edge cases, the actual needs of real people — is what makes whatever you build worth building. Don’t let early technical confusion make you forget that you’re the expert in what matters most.

Use AI as a thought partner and translator. Before writing a single line of code, describe your idea to an AI and ask it to help you think through how it could work. Ask it to explain concepts you don’t understand. Ask it to suggest approaches. Ask it what could go wrong. Then, as you build, use it to help you debug, refine, and extend. The quality of what you get out depends on the quality of what you put in — and practitioners who know their domain deeply tend to ask better questions.

Learn the loop: describe → generate → test → refine. This is the actual rhythm of building with AI tools. You describe what you want. The AI helps you generate something. You test it against reality. You refine based on what you learn. It’s iterative and messy and feels slow at first — and then it doesn’t. Each cycle teaches you something that makes the next one faster.

Don’t wait until you understand everything. You will never understand everything before you start, and waiting for that moment is how good ideas stay unbuilt. You need to understand enough to take the next step. That’s a lower bar than it sounds. If you can describe the next thing you need to figure out, you can figure it out.

Know what “done enough to share” looks like. Not done. Not perfect. Done enough to put in front of a real person and get real feedback. Set that bar before you start building so you don’t move it indefinitely. Early feedback from real users is worth more than months of building in isolation.

Build the quality in as you go. The first version of anything will have gaps. When you find them — especially when someone else finds them for you — treat that as signal, not failure. The response to “this broke” or “this didn’t work” is to build better, not to stop.

What this looked like for me

I have watched many of my coaching clients struggle with job searches for years; not because they were doing anything wrong, but because a significant number of roles never reach LinkedIn. They’re posted directly on company career pages and filled before any job board catches up.

So I built a crawler to find “under-the-radar” job listings. My first public attempt was humbling — I posted jobs before building any validation into the code, and many of them were dead links. I was mortified. Then I went back in, built verification logic directly into the tool, and kept going. That embarrassment didn’t undermine my resolve. It clarified it.

The result is “UXR Under-The-Radar Jobs” — a bi-weekly newsletter of verified, active UXR roles pulled directly from company career pages. It works. I built it without a technical background, after 20+ years doing something entirely different, because my community needed it and I wasn’t willing to just watch them struggle.

The real barrier

The barrier to building today is not technical. The tools exist. The access exists. The ability to learn enough to get started has never been more available.

The actual barrier is the willingness to start before you’re ready. To feel incompetent in public for a while. To ship something imperfect and keep going anyway. To care about a problem enough that the discomfort of not knowing what you’re doing is less painful than the discomfort of watching it go unsolved.

The people most likely to clear that bar aren’t the ones with the most technical training. They’re the ones with the clearest sense of purpose.

If you know what problem you’re trying to solve and who it’s for — you already have the most important part.

UXR Under-The-Radar Jobs surfaces verified, active UX Research roles directly from company career pages — often before they hit job boards. New issue every other Wednesday.

Coming back to the pipeline after a week away, I expected to find a smaller list. Roles that had closed while I was offline. Companies that had moved on. What I actually found: the list grew. Seven new roles surfaced this week, including Replit’s first-ever consumer insights hire and Harvey’s first public research role. The market kept moving without me watching it, and the roles are still there when I came back. That’s probably the most honest illustration of why this newsletter exists — not to monitor something that requires constant vigilance, but to surface what would be invisible to you whether you’re watching every day or not.

The timing felt worth saying something about, because I’ve been sitting with the job search and the marathon analogy. I use it a lot in coaching — the idea that a long search is a distance event, not a sprint — but I think we sometimes apply that logic only to the search itself and forget to apply it to the rest of our lives. Taking a week off does not mean you’ve fallen behind. The version of you that lands the right role is the rested version. The one who can show up to an interview energized and present, not the one who spent the last three months grinding without pause and is running on empty by the time the conversation that actually matters finally arrives.

If you’ve been treating every week of your search like it has to be a full sprint, this is your permission to build in a rest week. The pipeline ran when I got back. The roles were there. The market doesn’t reward exhaustion — it rewards readiness.

This week’s finds are some of the strongest the crawler has surfaced. Replit posted their first consumer insights research role — 100 million users, AI coding platform, and for the first time they need someone to actually understand those users systematically. Harvey, which builds AI for legal professionals and tends to hire quietly, is live with a Head of Research Community and Operations role. Notion now has three simultaneous researcher searches running at the same time, which is genuinely unusual for a company that has historically been deliberate about research headcount. And Mural is building out its customer insights function in two directions at once — a PM role and a Product Designer role, both live right now.

Twenty-two verified live roles below. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

The List

Replit — Senior Consumer Insights Research Manager 🆕 📍 Foster City, CA (Hybrid) Replit’s first-ever consumer insights hire. AI coding platform with 100M+ users. This role owns the insights function for a product used by developers, students, and hobbyists globally. The company has scaled faster than they’ve been able to understand their users — this hire changes that. High ownership, high ambiguity, significant opportunity. 👉 Apply directly here

Harvey — Head of Research Community and Operations 🆕 📍 San Francisco, CA (Full time) Harvey builds AI for legal professionals — one of the few enterprise AI companies that has made serious inroads with law firms and legal departments. This role leads research community and operations, which in a company at Harvey’s stage means building the infrastructure for how they understand their users. Quiet company, real role, found directly in their Ashby board. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, AI Evaluations 🆕 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Notion’s third simultaneous researcher search. AI Evaluations is a relatively new research function — sits at the intersection of user research and model quality, focused on how users experience Notion’s AI features. High relevance if you have experience with AI product research. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher 🆕 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY (Hybrid) Notion’s second new researcher this week. A general product research role at a company running three simultaneous searches — check the posting for team placement and scope. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Applied Data Science & Insights Leader, GTM Intelligence 🆕 📍A third OpenAI research-adjacent role, on the go-to-market intelligence side. Heads up: this one leans more toward data science and analytics than core UXR — SQL, modeling, and GTM strategy are central to the brief. Worth reviewing the full description before applying; it’s the right role if your background spans both research and applied data work. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Manager, Customer Insights 🆕 📍 Remote — US, Canada, or UK A second Mural role this week — Mural also has the Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights listed below. The PM role sits at the intersection of product and research. Worth reading both postings if Mural is on your list; they’re clearly investing in customer insights across functions. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Senior Marketing Analyst (Contract) 🆕 📍 Remote — California or New York Contract role, not FTE — flagging that upfront. Three simultaneous openings at Strava in data and insights right now: this one, the Staff UX Product Researcher, and the Lead Marketing Analyst. Worth reviewing if contract work fits your situation. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Staff UX Product Researcher, Route Discovery & Navigation 📍 Berlin, DE (Full time) Staff-level research focused on how 150M+ athletes navigate routes — foundational to what Strava’s product actually is. On-site in Berlin. Strong signal that Strava takes research seriously across the full product. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Lead Marketing Analyst 📍 New York, NY (Hybrid) Data and insights role sitting at the intersection of marketing and user understanding, part of the same Data and Insights function as the UXR role above. Hybrid in NYC. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — LATAM Marketing Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA | 💰 $150K–$208K Research leadership owning the full LatAm insights function — qual and quant, brand health, campaign strategy, audience intelligence. Not findable by searching “UX researcher” — my crawler surfaces it because the title doesn’t use those words. 6–8+ years experience expected. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Makati, Philippines (Hybrid) Mid-level insights role at Canva’s Philippines hub. Worth flagging the location upfront — on-site/hybrid in Makati. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne, AU — or Remote Research leadership at one of the most design-forward companies in the world. Remote option available — check the posting for geo restrictions. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU — or Remote Both Canva locations are open simultaneously. Two separate openings at the same level — unusual for a role like this. 👉 Apply directly here

Cohere — Staff UX Researcher 📍 Toronto, London, or New York, NY Cohere builds enterprise AI infrastructure — large language models for businesses not building on OpenAI. Staff-level UXR at a company operating at the frontier of how AI gets deployed at scale. Three location options. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE (Hybrid — 2 days/week) Research embedded in the logistics and rider experience at one of the largest delivery platforms on the planet. Hybrid in Berlin. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Same company, different market. Research here has genuine global scope. Arabic proficiency required. Worth flagging the location upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA | 💰 $120K–$125K FullStory makes digital experience analytics tools — research at a company whose entire product is about understanding user behavior. Salary range posted. On-site in Atlanta. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Lovable is the AI coding tool that lets anyone build software from a prompt. This is their first UXR hire — on-site in Stockholm. High ambiguity, high ownership, not for everyone. For the right person, the story you’ll be able to tell in two years is one of a kind. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 🇨🇦 Remote — Canada only Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by research and design teams everywhere. This role sits at the intersection of design and research. The only Canada-remote role on this week’s list. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in the growth function — high visibility, direct product impact, salary posted upfront. One of three simultaneous researcher searches Notion has running right now. Worth applying to all three if the scope fits. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA or New York, NY (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered Mixed-methods market research embedded in OpenAI’s Marketing function — brand, product marketing, international strategy. SF or NYC. 10+ years experience expected. One of three simultaneous research searches at OpenAI right now. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered A rare quant-focused UXR role — surveys, experiments, behavioral data analysis, SQL and Python expected. 5+ years experience. Relocation support offered if you’re not already in SF. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles come out of a crawler I built that pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and others — before they hit any job board. That’s why Replit and Harvey appear here and nowhere else. The only way to catch roles like those is to be watching the right systems.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out Tuesday morning — same format, new verified roles. With 174 companies in the mix and wider keyword coverage, the surface area keeps growing.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

“Am I a dinosaur? Is it inevitable that we become parents and fall out of the job market?”

I read it twice. Then I sat with it for a while.

Not because I didn’t know what to say. But because I wanted to say it right.

That question -- am I a dinosaur? -- is not a small question. It’s not really about job market trends or hiring cycles or what industry you’re in. It’s the question underneath all of that. The one that gets louder at 2am, the one you don’t say out loud in interviews, or to your partner, or even to yourself most of the time.

Am I already obsolete?

I want to answer it honestly. Which means I have to start by saying: I’m not going to tell you the bias isn’t real. Because it is.

Career gaps get scrutinized. Time taken to raise children or care for family gets read differently than time taken for anything else -- a sabbatical, a health crisis, a startup that didn’t work out. The re-entry is harder. The market is brutal right now even for people who never stepped away, who have clean continuous lines on their resumes, who did everything “right.” None of what you’re feeling is in your head, and you are not imagining the headwinds.

This is true for women more often than it’s talked about. It’s also true for men who stayed home with their kids, or left work to be the primary caregiver, and are now watching the market look past them as though the time away erased something. It didn’t. But the market can act like it did.

That’s the truth. And I’m not going to dress it up.

But here’s the other truth.

Dinosaurs didn’t go extinct because they were weak.

They went extinct because the climate changed -- fast, and without warning -- and the environment stopped reflecting who they were. They were extraordinarily well-adapted creatures. Dominant, even. And then something shifted in the world around them, and the ecosystem stopped recognizing what they had to offer.

That is not a story about inadequacy. That is a story about an ecosystem that shifted around them.

I want you to feel the difference between those two things.

Because one of them puts the failure in you. And one of them puts it where it actually belongs.

Here is what I know about people who’ve stepped away for their families and are navigating the return:

They are not behind. They are carrying a depth of skill that most uninterrupted career paths never force you to develop. The ability to navigate ambiguity without a roadmap. To manage competing needs with no resources and no recognition. To hold a long view when everything around you is urgent. To stay present for the human being in front of you even when the system is failing both of you.

These are not soft skills. These are the skills that make a great leader. A great collaborator. A great anything.

The problem is not what you’re bringing. The problem is that the market hasn’t built the language to receive it yet -- and so the burden falls on you to translate.

That’s exhausting. It’s also unfair. And it’s the work.

“Is it inevitable?” she asked.

No. But it requires something that most job search advice skips entirely: the work of reconnecting with who you actually are -- not who the gap years made you doubt you were -- so that when you’re in the room, you’re fully in it. Not performing a version of yourself that pre-dates your life. Not apologizing for the time. Not over-explaining the choice.

Just you. Clear. Grounded. Able to say: here is what I know, here is what I’ve done, here is what I bring -- and mean it.

That clarity doesn’t come from updating your LinkedIn headline. It comes from doing the actual work of separating your signal from the noise that accumulated while you were away.

The noise that says the gap is a verdict.

The noise that says the market has moved on.

The noise that asks, at 2am, am I a dinosaur?

You are not a dinosaur.

You are someone who built a life and is now navigating a market that has shifted around you.

That is a different problem. And it has a different solution.

I’m glad you’re here. Keep reading. And if you’re ready to do that work -- the real work, not the resume work -- I have a space opening up in July for exactly this. Eight people. Six weeks. Real coaching.

DM me or reply here if you want to know more.

-- Liz

I coach senior UXR professionals now, and I hear a version of this fear constantly. People who are genuinely excellent at their work, with ten or fifteen years of experience, wondering whether they’ve built a career in something that’s being phased out.

I want to push back on that. Not with reassurance, but with data.

I built a job crawler specifically because I suspected the picture on LinkedIn was incomplete. The crawler pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable — before any role reaches an aggregator. This week I expanded it from 71 companies to 174 and broadened the keyword filter to catch research-adjacent titles — “marketing research,” “insights analyst,” “research lead” — that were previously invisible to the pipeline. And what the data is showing me is not a discipline in decline. It’s a discipline in transition, and the growth is happening somewhere many researchers aren’t looking.

The pattern nobody’s talking about

The big tech UXR cuts are real and they’re visible, which is why they dominate the conversation. When Meta cuts research headcount, it generates dozens of LinkedIn posts. When Lovable hires their first ever UX researcher, it generates nothing — because it happens quietly, on a small company’s Ashby board, and nobody outside their ATS knows it happened.

That asymmetry in visibility is distorting how researchers understand the market.

Here’s what I’m actually seeing across 174 companies right now: AI-first companies — the ones that grew up in the last three to five years building products with AI at the core — are hiring UX researchers for the first time, because they’ve reached a stage of maturity where they can no longer afford to operate without understanding their users.

Lovable built an AI coding tool that lets anyone create software from a prompt. They shipped incredibly fast, grew faster, and got to a point where they had hundreds of thousands of users they didn’t fully understand. Now they’ve posted their first UXR role. On-site in Stockholm, not on any job board, found by my crawler. That’s not a company cutting research. That’s a company realizing they need it.

Cohere builds enterprise AI infrastructure — large language models for businesses that aren’t building on OpenAI. Their users are developers and technical decision-makers trying to figure out how to integrate AI into production systems. Understanding those users isn’t a nice-to-have at Cohere. It’s the difference between building something developers will actually use and building something they’ll abandon after the first frustrating week. Staff UX Researcher, Toronto, London, or New York.

Strava just surfaced two Data and Insights roles simultaneously — a Staff UX Product Researcher focused on Route Discovery and Navigation in Berlin, plus a Lead Marketing Analyst in New York. A company with 150 million users and a deeply engaged community, now investing across the full insights function at once. All pulled directly from their Ashby board.

Harvey is in the pipeline. Synthesia. Character AI. I’m watching all of them directly in their hiring systems.

Why this moment is different from the last wave of UXR hiring

When research teams grew rapidly at big tech between 2018 and 2022, it was partly because it was fashionable and partly because companies had the budget. A lot of those roles were added without a clear theory of how research would create value. When the cuts came, those were the easiest roles to eliminate — the ones where the value proposition had never been clearly established.

What I’m seeing now is different. The AI-first companies hiring UXR for the first time are doing it because they have a specific problem they can’t solve without it. The gap between what their product can do and what users actually experience is large and growing, and they know it. They’re not hiring researchers because it’s trendy. They’re hiring because they’ve shipped enough to understand what they don’t know.

That’s a more durable foundation for a research function than headcount growth driven by favorable market conditions.

What this means if you’re in a search right now

The practical implication is straightforward: if you’re only watching LinkedIn and Indeed, you’re not watching the market. You’re watching one subset of the market — the part that’s loudest and most visible — and that’s the part where the narrative of contraction is loudest.

The companies hiring right now are posting on Ashby. On Greenhouse. On SmartRecruiters. They’re filling roles without announcing them, and the searches often close before anything surfaces more broadly.

What you bring to a first or early research hire at one of these companies is also different from what you’d optimize for in a mature research org. It’s not about process infrastructure and stakeholder frameworks. It’s about moving fast with limited resources, building trust with a product and engineering team that has never worked closely with a researcher, and making research legible to leadership that is genuinely uncertain whether it’s worth the investment. The researchers who thrive in these environments tend to have strong opinions, move quickly, and are comfortable being the only person in the room advocating for users.

The researcher who joins Lovable today is going to have a story to tell in two years that nobody else has.

On staying intact through a long search

I want to say something to the people reading this who are in an active search and finding it harder than they expected.

The roles I track — staff, senior, research leadership — routinely take four to six months from first application to offer. Not because you’re doing something wrong. Because the hiring process at this level is genuinely slow, and companies are selective, and a lot of the timeline is outside your control. If you’re three months in, you are almost certainly in the middle of a normal search, not the end of a failed one.

Four of the roles on this week’s list have been open for a full month. OpenAI has had two research searches running simultaneously for four consecutive weeks and still hasn’t hired. Notion’s growth researcher role has been open just as long. These aren’t companies that have given up on the search or quietly decided not to fill it. They are actively looking and they haven’t found the right person yet. If you’ve been sitting on those applications, this is the moment.

Your pipeline is data, not a report card. What’s moving and what isn’t tells you something real about positioning and timing and fit — it is not a verdict on your value as a researcher or a person. Keeping that distinction clear, especially across a long search, is genuinely hard and genuinely matters.

Subscribe now

If you’re a UXR professional in an active search who wants a real thought partner on positioning, strategy, and staying intact through a long process — let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

OpenAI has had two research roles open simultaneously for four consecutive weeks now. Notion’s growth researcher role has been live for a month. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment, I’d gently suggest: this is it.

This week I also expanded the crawler’s keyword filter to cast a wider net, adding titles like “marketing research,” “insights analyst,” and “research lead” that sit adjacent to UXR but were previously invisible to the pipeline. The first thing that surfaced: a Canva LATAM Marketing Research Lead role in San Francisco at $150K–$208K that nobody in the UXR community is talking about because the title doesn’t say “UX.” More on that below.

The pipeline also found two Strava Data and Insights roles — a Staff UX Product Researcher in Berlin and a Lead Marketing Analyst in NYC. Pulled directly from their Ashby board.

Fifteen verified live roles below. Every apply button was confirmed this morning.

The List

Strava — Staff UX Product Researcher, Route Discovery & Navigation 🆕 📍 Berlin, DE (Full time) Strava is where athletes live — 150M+ users, deeply engaged community, and a product culture that takes research seriously. Staff-level research role focused on route discovery and navigation, embedded in the Berlin office. New to this list this week. 👉 Apply directly here

Strava — Lead Marketing Analyst 🆕 📍 New York, NY (Hybrid) Data and insights role sitting at the intersection of marketing and user understanding. Part of the same Data and Insights function as the UXR role above. Hybrid in NYC. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — LATAM Marketing Research Lead 🆕 📍 San Francisco, CA | 💰 $150K–$208K Research leadership role owning the full LatAm insights function — qual and quant, brand health, campaign strategy, audience intelligence. This role exists to answer Canva’s hardest growth questions for one of their most critical regions. Not findable by searching “UX researcher.” My crawler found it because I expanded the keyword filter this week. 6–8+ years experience expected. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Makati, Philippines (Hybrid) Mid-level insights role at Canva’s Manila office. Canva runs a serious research function globally — this is the Philippines hub. Worth flagging the location upfront; the role is on-site/hybrid in Makati. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne or Sydney, AU — or Remote Research leadership at one of the most design-forward companies in the world. Both locations are open simultaneously. Remote option available — check the posting for geo restrictions. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU — or Remote Both Canva locations are open simultaneously. If you saw the Melbourne listing above and assumed one was a duplicate — it’s not. Two separate openings at the same level. Unusual for a role like this. 👉 Apply directly here

Cohere — Staff UX Researcher 📍 Toronto, London, or New York, NY Cohere builds enterprise AI infrastructure — large language models for businesses that aren’t building on OpenAI. Staff-level UXR at a company operating at the frontier of how AI gets deployed at scale. Three locations, which is unusual. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE (Hybrid — 2 days/week) Research embedded in the logistics and rider experience at one of the largest delivery platforms on the planet. Hybrid schedule in Berlin — two days in office. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Same company, different market. Delivery Hero operates across 70+ countries — research here has real global scope. Arabic proficiency required. Worth flagging the location upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA | 💰 $120K–$125K FullStory makes digital experience analytics tools — so you’d be doing research at a company whose entire product is about understanding user behavior. Salary range posted. On-site in Atlanta. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Lovable is the AI coding tool that lets anyone build software from a prompt. They’ve grown faster than almost any product company in recent memory. This is their first UXR hire — on-site in Stockholm. High-ambiguity, high-ownership, not for everyone. For the right person, very interesting. Still open. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 🇨🇦 Remote — Canada only Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by research and design teams everywhere. This role sits at the intersection of design and research — customer insights focus. The only Canada-remote role on this week’s list. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in the growth function — high visibility, direct product impact. Salary posted upfront. Four weeks live and counting. They want the right person badly enough to keep this open. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA or New York, NY (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered Four weeks live. Mixed-methods market research role embedded in OpenAI’s Marketing function — brand, product marketing, international strategy. SF or NYC. 10+ years experience expected. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered Also four weeks live. A rare quant-focused UXR role — surveys, experiments, behavioral data analysis, SQL and Python expected. 5+ years experience. Two research roles open at OpenAI for a full month: that’s a signal. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles come out of a crawler I built that pulls directly from company ATS systems like Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and others, typically before they hit any job boards. You are getting them directly from the source, not filtered through an aggregator’s algorithm.

The Strava roles are a good example, found directly in their Ashby board. The only way to reliably catch these is to be watching the right systems.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out Tuesday morning — same format, new verified roles. With 174 companies in the mix, the surface area for finding something is real.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

Nine roles from last week are still live. When a role stays open for two or more weeks at a company like OpenAI or Notion, it means they haven’t found the right person yet. The window is real. And it’s still open.

This week I also spent time under the hood. The crawler that powers this list just got significantly bigger.

When I started, it monitored 71 companies across three ATS platforms. This week I expanded it to over 170 companies — more than doubled — by adding new targets across Ashby, SmartRecruiters, and Workable. Companies like Amplitude, Intercom, Webflow, Robinhood, Chime, Contentsquare, Adyen, Zalando, Hotjar, Maze, and more are now in the pipeline. I also fixed a probe issue with Lever that was causing valid boards to return false negatives, and added a secondary Canva location that the original setup was collapsing into one.

The expanded pipeline surfaced one new role this week: Cohere. Staff UX Researcher, with openings in Toronto, London, and New York.

Twelve verified live roles below. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

The List

Canva — Customer Insights Analyst 🆕 📍 Makati, Philippines (Hybrid) Mid-level insights role at Canva’s Manila office. Canva runs a serious research function globally — this is the Philippines hub. Worth flagging the location upfront; the role is on-site/hybrid in Makati. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne or Sydney, AU — or Remote Research leadership at one of the most design-forward companies in the world. Both locations are open simultaneously. Remote option available — check the posting for geo restrictions. 👉 Apply directly here

Cohere — Staff UX Researcher 🆕 📍 Toronto, London, or New York, NY Cohere builds enterprise AI infrastructure — large language models for businesses that aren’t building on OpenAI. Staff-level UXR at a company operating at the frontier of how AI gets deployed at scale. Three locations, which is unusual. Not on LinkedIn. New to this list this week. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE Research embedded in the logistics and rider experience at one of the largest delivery platforms on the planet. On-site in Berlin. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Same company, different market. Delivery Hero operates across 70+ countries — research here has real global scope. Worth flagging the location upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA FullStory makes digital experience analytics tools — so you’d be doing research at a company whose entire product is about understanding user behavior. On-site in Atlanta. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Lovable is the AI coding tool that lets anyone build software from a prompt. They’ve grown faster than almost any product company in recent memory. This is their first UXR hire — on-site in Stockholm. High-ambiguity, high-ownership, not for everyone. For the right person, very interesting. Still open. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 🇨🇦 Remote — Canada only Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by research and design teams everywhere. This role sits at the intersection of design and research — customer insights focus. The only Canada-remote role on this week’s list. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in the growth function — high visibility, direct product impact. Salary posted upfront. Still live. Three weeks and counting. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA or New York, NY (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered Three weeks live. Mixed-methods market research role embedded in OpenAI’s Marketing function — brand, product marketing, international strategy. SF or NYC. 10+ years experience expected. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid — 3 days/week) | Relocation offered Also three weeks live. A rare quant-focused UXR role — surveys, experiments, behavioral data analysis, SQL and Python expected. 5+ years experience. OpenAI having two research roles open simultaneously for three consecutive weeks is worth paying attention to. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU — or Remote Both Canva locations are open simultaneously. If you saw the Melbourne listing above and assumed one was a duplicate — it’s not. Two separate openings at the same level. Unusual for a role like this. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles come out of a crawler I built that pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and others — before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles appear here days before, or never appear at all, on LinkedIn or Indeed.

This week the crawler expanded from 71 companies to over 170. I added new targets across Ashby (Amplitude, Intercom, Webflow, Robinhood, Chime, Noom, Productboard, Harvey, Synthesia, and more), SmartRecruiters (Adyen, Zalando, Contentsquare, Doctolib, Checkout.com), and Workable (Maze, Hotjar, Usersnap, Survicate). I also fixed a Lever integration issue that was suppressing valid boards, and corrected how some ATS platforms surface location data.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals, and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out Tuesday morning — same format, new verified roles. With 170+ companies now in the mix, the surface area for finding something new just got a lot larger.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

And some of that is true. The research function at large, mature tech companies has gotten harder to staff into and easier to cut.

But there’s another thing happening at the same time — and it’s mostly invisible if you’re only watching LinkedIn.

A wave of AI-first companies is hiring UX researchers for the first time.

What the crawler is finding

I run a job crawler that pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable — often before roles hit any aggregator. This week I expanded it from 71 companies to over 170, and the pattern that jumped out wasn’t about the usual suspects.

It was about who’s hiring UXR for the first time.

Lovable — the AI coding tool that went from zero to everywhere in about six months — just posted their first ever UX Researcher role. On-site in Stockholm. Not on any job board when my crawler found it. They’ve built a product that lets anyone create software from a prompt. They’ve shipped fast, grown fast, and now they’re asking: who are our users, actually? What do they need? Where are we getting it wrong?

That’s a first UXR hire. That’s a blank slate. That’s also a lot of ambiguity, but it’s the kind of ambiguity that comes with real ownership.

Cohere — one of the leading enterprise AI companies, building large language models for businesses — just posted a Staff UX Researcher role with openings in Toronto, London, and New York. Cohere’s users are developers, technical decision-makers, enterprises trying to figure out how to build with AI. Understanding those users deeply isn’t optional. It’s the product strategy.

Harvey is in the pipeline. Synthesia is in the pipeline. Character AI is in the pipeline. I’m watching all of them. None of these roles are on LinkedIn, yet. Some may never be.

Why this is happening now

AI products are hard to use well.

The promise is enormous — “just talk to it, it understands you” — and the reality is much messier. Users don’t know what to ask. They don’t know what the model can and can’t do. They get surprising outputs and don’t know if that’s a feature or a bug. They build workflows that work until they don’t.

The better these companies get at understanding the gap between what the product can do and what users actually experience, the better their product gets. That’s not a design problem. It’s a research problem.

And most of these companies built fast and shipped fast without researchers. Now they’re large enough, and their user bases complex enough, that they can’t afford not to know who they’re building for.

What this means if you’re in a search

First: expand where you’re looking. If you’re only watching LinkedIn and Indeed, you’re missing this entire category of hiring. These companies post on Ashby. They post on Greenhouse. They post quietly and fill quickly.

Second: think about what you bring to a first or early research hire. The skills that matter most aren’t the ones you’d optimize for in a mature research org — it’s not about process and scale and stakeholder alignment frameworks. It’s about moving fast, building trust with skeptical engineers, and making research legible to a team that’s never worked with a researcher before.

Third: don’t rule them out because they’re small or because you can’t find them on a list. The researcher who joins Lovable today is going to have a story to tell in two years that nobody else has.

The bigger picture

There’s a version of this moment that’s scary for researchers: AI is synthesizing faster, companies are cutting headcount, the discipline is shrinking.

And there’s another version: the companies building AI are learning, slowly, that they need people who actually understand humans. That user research isn’t something you do after you’ve shipped, it’s how you figure out what to ship. That “just use the model to do research” creates a feedback loop with no real signal.

The second version is also happening. It’s just happening quietly, on ATS platforms that most researchers never check.

That’s what I built this crawler to find.

My free weekly newsletter pulls verified UXR roles directly from company hiring systems before they hit any job board. 170+ companies monitored. Every link confirmed before it reaches you.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a search while managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

Nine roles from last week are still live. That’s not a coincidence — it’s a signal. When a role stays open for two or more weeks at a company like OpenAI or Notion, it means they haven’t found the right person yet. The window is real. And it’s still open.

This week I also spent time under the hood. The crawler that powers this list just got significantly bigger.

When I started, it monitored 71 companies across three ATS platforms. This week I expanded it to over 170 companies — more than doubled — by adding new targets across Ashby, SmartRecruiters, and Workable. Companies like Amplitude, Intercom, Webflow, Robinhood, Chime, Contentsquare, Adyen, Zalando, Hotjar, Maze, and more are now in the pipeline. I also fixed a probe issue with Lever that was causing valid boards to return false negatives, and added a secondary Canva location that the original setup was collapsing into one.

The expanded pipeline didn’t surface brand-new roles this week — but it will. More companies monitored means more surface area. The list gets better every week it runs.

Ten verified live roles below. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

The List

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne or Sydney, AU — or Remote Research leadership at one of the most design-forward companies in the world. Both locations are open simultaneously. Remote option available — check the posting for geo restrictions. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE Research embedded in the logistics and rider experience at one of the largest delivery platforms on the planet. On-site in Berlin. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Same company, different market. Delivery Hero operates across 70+ countries — research here has real global scope. Worth flagging the location upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA FullStory makes digital experience analytics tools — so you’d be doing research at a company whose entire product is about understanding user behavior. On-site in Atlanta. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Lovable is the AI coding tool that lets anyone build software from a prompt. They’ve grown faster than almost any product company in recent memory. This is their first UXR hire — on-site in Stockholm. High-ambiguity, high-ownership, not for everyone. For the right person, very interesting. Still open. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 🇨🇦 Remote — Canada only Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by research and design teams everywhere. This role sits at the intersection of design and research — customer insights focus. The only Canada-remote role on this week’s list. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in the growth function — high visibility, direct product impact. Salary posted upfront. Still live. Two weeks and counting. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA (On-site) | Relocation offered Two weeks live. Market research scope at OpenAI right now is unlike almost anywhere else. On-site San Francisco. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (On-site) | Relocation offered Also two weeks live. A rare quant-focused UXR role. OpenAI having two research roles open simultaneously — and keeping both open for two consecutive weeks — is worth paying attention to. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU — or Remote Both Canva locations are open simultaneously. If you saw the Melbourne listing above and assumed one was a duplicate — it’s not. Two separate openings at the same level. Unusual for a role like this. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles come out of a crawler I built that pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and others — before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles appear here days before, or never appear at all, on LinkedIn or Indeed.

This week the crawler expanded from 71 companies to over 170. I added new targets across Ashby (Amplitude, Intercom, Webflow, Robinhood, Chime, Noom, Productboard, Harvey, Synthesia, and more), SmartRecruiters (Adyen, Zalando, Contentsquare, Doctolib, Checkout.com), and Workable (Maze, Hotjar, Usersnap, Survicate). I also fixed a Lever integration issue that was suppressing valid boards, and corrected how some ATS platforms surface location data.

The expanded pipeline didn’t produce brand-new roles this week — the new boards are freshly added and will take a cycle or two to surface openings. But more companies monitored means more signal over time.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out Tuesday morning — same format, new verified roles. With 170+ companies now in the mix, the surface area for finding something new just got a lot larger.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

Liz McDermitt, CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

“I’m doing everything right. I’m getting interviews. I’m making it to the final rounds. But I can’t seem to close. And I’m starting to wonder if something is wrong with me.”

Here’s what I know about that moment.

It might be how you’re positioning yourself -- the story you’re telling about your experience and what you bring. It might be something specific happening in final rounds: how you’re talking about your work, how you’re navigating the dynamics of a panel, how you’re handling the moments when someone pushes back.

These are real things. They’re fixable. And they’re worth looking at.

But there’s also something else that most job search help doesn’t touch.

A layoff is not just a job loss. It’s an identity event. And the search that follows happens inside a mind that is still processing what that event meant -- about you, about your work, about whether you’re still who you thought you were.

That processing doesn’t stop when you’re in an interview. It runs in the background, at low volume, until the stakes feel high enough that it gets loud. Final rounds are exactly that moment. The moment when the most powerful thing you could do is walk in fully as yourself -- and something quietly pulls you back.

That voice is not feedback. It’s noise. But it’s noise you can name, and once you name it, it loses most of its power.

Most job search support gives you one or the other. The tactical stuff -- resume reviews, LinkedIn audits, interview prep. Or the mindset stuff -- frameworks, journaling prompts, motivation.

What I’ve learned, from years of coaching and from my own time navigating this market as a senior leader is that you need both, and you need someone who can tell the difference between a positioning problem and a confidence problem -- because they look almost identical from the outside.

That’s what I kept hearing when people reached out. I need a thought partner. A coach. A sounding board. Someone to keep me accountable. And someone who actually understands this industry and this market.

So I built it.

Trust Your Signal is a six-week group coaching program -- ten professionals, meeting weekly, doing real work on both sides of the equation. The tactical: positioning, search strategy, LinkedIn, networking, what’s actually working in this market right now. And the deeper work: naming the noise, separating your signal from the layoff story, showing up as yourself when it counts most.

$397 for the full six weeks. Starting July 9. Space for ten people.

If you’ve been making it to the final rounds and stalling -- and you’ve been quietly wondering if it’s you -- let’s look at it together. All of it.

Reply here or DM me on LinkedIn to grab a spot. And Subscribe below for more content like this

Subscribe now

Liz McDermitt, Platypus Coaching, CPCC, ACC

Ex-Meta, Ex-USAA

Three companies on this week’s list weren’t in the crawler at all seven days ago. FullStory, Lovable, and Mural all came in from an expanded pipeline — new ATS sources, new boards. If you only checked LinkedIn, you wouldn’t have found these.

Ten verified live roles below. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

The List

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne or Sydney, AU — or Remote Research leadership at one of the most design-forward companies in the world. Both locations are open simultaneously. The remote option is new information this week — worth checking the posting for geo restrictions. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher (Logistics, Rider) 📍 Berlin, DE Research embedded in the logistics and rider experience at one of the largest delivery platforms on the planet. On-site in Berlin. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Same company, different market. Delivery Hero operates across 70+ countries — research here has real global scope. Worth flagging the location upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 Remote + multiple office locations | 💰 $180K–$272K Still live from last week. Remote-eligible with office options. Staff-level scope at a company that has consistently invested in research. Strong comp band. 👉 Apply directly here

FullStory — Senior Customer Insights Analyst 📍 Atlanta, GA FullStory makes digital experience analytics tools — so you’d be doing research at a company whose entire product is about understanding user behavior. On-site in Atlanta. New to this list this week. 👉 Apply directly here

Lovable — UX Researcher 📍 Stockholm, SE Lovable is the AI coding tool that lets anyone build software from a prompt. They’ve grown faster than almost any product company in recent memory. This is their first UXR hire — on-site in Stockholm. High-ambiguity, high-ownership, not for everyone. For the right person, very interesting. 👉 Apply directly here

Mural — Senior Product Designer, Customer Insights 📍 🇨🇦 Remote — Canada only Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by research and design teams everywhere. This role sits at the intersection of design and research — customer insights focus. The only Canada-remote role on this week’s list. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in the growth function — high visibility, direct product impact. Salary posted upfront. Still live from last week. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA (On-site) | Relocation offered Still live. Market research scope at OpenAI right now is unlike almost anywhere else. On-site San Francisco. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (On-site) | Relocation offered Also still live. A rare quant-focused UXR role. Not on LinkedIn. OpenAI having two research roles open simultaneously is worth paying attention to. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles come out of a crawler I built that pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, and others — before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles appear here days before, or never appear at all, on LinkedIn or Indeed.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If an apply button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

This is a curated list on purpose. I’d rather give you 10 real roles than 40 dead ends.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. Junior and contract roles are coming.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly and I will post new verified roles mid-week.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

Three new ones came in this morning that weren’t on the list last week. An Airbnb consumer insights role that isn’t showing on LinkedIn. A second opening at OpenAI. And Lyst — a London fashion tech company — posting a Senior UXR that their Greenhouse board isn’t even surfacing.

Ten verified live roles below. Every apply button confirmed this morning.

The List

Airbnb — Senior Consumer Insights Lead, Marketing & Strategic Intelligence 📍 United States | 💰 $212K–$262K Consumer insights embedded in marketing strategy — this is a high-visibility role at a company that takes research seriously. Not showing on LinkedIn. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne, AU Senior research leadership at one of the most design-forward product companies in the world. Still live from last week. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU Same role, different location. Both are open simultaneously — unusual for a role at this level. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Delivery Hero operates across 70+ countries. This role is in Riyadh — worth flagging upfront. If you’re open to the region, it’s a serious research function at global scale. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 New York, NY | 💰 $180K–$272K Staff-level. Strong salary band. Duolingo is one of the few consumer tech companies that has consistently invested in research. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 Pittsburgh, PA | 💰 $180K–$272K Same role, same comp — different location. Pittsburgh is often less competitive for the same tier of role. 👉 Apply directly here

Lyst — Senior User Researcher 📍 London, UK Lyst is a global fashion search platform. This role isn’t surfacing on their Greenhouse board — the crawler found it through a secondary source. Worth looking at if you’re London-based or open to it. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Research embedded in growth — high visibility, high impact. Salary posted upfront, which tells you something about the culture. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Market Research Lead 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) | Relocation offered A second opening at OpenAI this week — this one is market research focused. Scope and visibility at OpenAI right now is unlike almost anywhere else. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) | Relocation offered Still live from last week. A rare quant-focused UXR role. Not on LinkedIn. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles came out of my crawler, which pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, and SmartRecruiters — before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles show up here days before, or never show up at all, on LinkedIn or Indeed.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If a button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

This is a curated list on purpose. I’d rather give you 10 real roles than 40 dead ends.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. I’m planning to add junior and contract roles soon.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out next week — same format, new verified roles.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

Someone reaches out, a mid-career professional, recently laid off or struggling in a role that doesn’t fit. They’re not asking for job leads. They’re asking something harder: can you work with me? And then they say it.

I can’t afford individual coaching right now. But I need something.

I’ve heard this from enough people that I stopped thinking of it as individual circumstances and started thinking of it as a gap I have the ability to fill.

So I developed a group coaching program.

Trust Your Signal is a six-week group coaching series, starting July 9, for mid-career professionals who are between jobs or deeply disappointed with their careers. Eight people. Wednesdays at 10am PT. Real live coaching - not a course or a webinar.

Here’s what we’re going to do together:

We’re going to name the saboteurs.

The voices in your head that took a market correction and turned it into evidence about your value. The ones whispering that maybe you applied too big, wanted too much, aren’t quite right for what the market wants right now. They have names. We’re going to find them.

We’re going to stop the self-blame.

A layoff is not a verdict. Underemployment is not a verdict. The job market is brutal in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of your work, and I want you to know that somewhere deeper than just nodding along when someone tells you it’s not personal.

We’re going to build real skills.

Under-the-radar job searching for finding roles before they hit LinkedIn. Networking that doesn’t feel like begging. How to show up in conversations as the expert you still are.

And we’re going to build a room.

Eight people who are going through the same thing at the same time, who can look at each other across a Zoom screen and realize: it’s not just me. And it’s not personal. That safe space is one of the most powerful things I can offer.

You are still naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. The market has not changed that. A layoff has not changed that. This series is designed to remind you of that, and give you the tools to act like it.

$397 for six weeks - A fraction of what individual coaching costs, designed to be accessible.

Eight seats. Sessions start July 9. Applications close June 27.

Message me if you are interested and I can share more details.

If it’s not for you but you know someone it’s for, please forward this.

Trust your signal and Let’s Get Glowing.

— Liz

8 verified-live UX research roles. All sourced directly from company ATS boards.

Happy Tuesday. This week’s crawl ran across Greenhouse, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, and Lever and returned 8 active openings — all pulled directly from company ATS boards and confirmed live with apply buttons as of today.

Four are brand new this week. Here’s everything.

🆕 New This Week

Canva — Head of Design Research

Locations: Sydney, AU · Melbourne, AU (two separate postings) Source: SmartRecruiters First seen: April 28, 2026

Canva is hiring a Head of Design Research across two Australian locations simultaneously. This is a senior leadership role — likely sitting above individual researchers and shaping the research practice at one of the most design-forward product companies in the world. The dual posting suggests they’re flexible on city if you’re open to relocating within Australia.

→ Apply — Sydney → Apply — Melbourne

Lyst — Senior User Researcher

Location: Not listed (check posting for details) Source: Workable First seen: May 5, 2026

Lyst is a global fashion search platform aggregating inventory from 12,000+ stores. The Senior User Researcher role is newly live as of today — it wasn’t findable until a fix to the Workable crawler restored coverage of this source. If fashion-tech and consumer e-commerce research is your wheelhouse, this one’s worth a look before it picks up traction.

→ Apply

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher

Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Source: SmartRecruiters First seen: April 28, 2026

Delivery Hero operates food delivery platforms across 70+ countries (Talabat, Foodpanda, and others). The Riyadh posting puts this role at the intersection of high-growth market expansion and consumer research — an interesting opportunity if you’re open to the Middle East and want to work at scale.

→ Apply

📌 Still Active from Previous Weeks

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher

Locations: Pittsburgh, PA · New York, NY (two separate postings) Source: Greenhouse First seen: April 21, 2026 · Still live as of: May 5, 2026

Staff-level role at one of the most research-invested product companies in consumer tech. Duolingo consistently invests in understanding learner behavior at depth. Two city postings — if you’re in NYC or can relocate to Pittsburgh this is worth a close look.

→ Apply — Pittsburgh → Apply — New York

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher

Location: Remote Source: Ashby First seen: April 9, 2026 · Still live as of: May 5, 2026

A quant-focused UXR role at the most scrutinized AI company in the world. If you have a strong survey, experimentation, or data-methods background this is a rare opportunity in the research space. Still open nearly a month after first posting.

→ Apply

Notion — User Researcher, Growth

Location: Remote Source: Ashby First seen: April 9, 2026 · Still live as of: May 5, 2026

Notion’s growth team is hiring a researcher — a rarer type of embedded research role focused on acquisition, activation, and retention rather than core product. If you’ve worked at the intersection of research and growth functions, this is worth reading.

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Source Coverage

All sources are running cleanly as of this issue. Greenhouse (46 companies), Ashby (27 companies), SmartRecruiters (4 companies), Workable (2 companies), and Lever (4 companies) were all crawled for this edition. No active UXR roles were found at Lever targets (Articulate, Wealthsimple, Carta, Quora) or at Wise (Workable) this week.

Hidden UXR crawls company ATS systems directly, not job aggregators. All roles are verified live before each issue. If a role has disappeared by the time you click, it closed after our verification window.

Built and curated by Platypus Coaching.

It now monitors 78 companies, including the first European companies I’ve added since I started building this. Canva. Wise. Delivery Hero. Companies with real research teams that post quietly, fill fast, and rarely syndicate to LinkedIn.

I also added a third source alongside Greenhouse and Ashby: SmartRecruiters, which is where a lot of European and global companies run their hiring. The pipeline now pulls from all three APIs every week.

Every role below was verified live this morning. Apply buttons confirmed. No dead ends.

The List

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Melbourne, AU Senior research leadership at one of the most design-forward product companies in the world. This is a rare opening — Canva doesn’t post roles like this often. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — Head of Design Research 📍 Sydney, AU Same role, different location. If you’re in Sydney or open to it — this is the same opportunity. 👉 Apply directly here

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 Remote Still live from last week. A rare quantitative-focused UXR role at one of the most consequential AI companies right now. Not on LinkedIn. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $160K–$200K Still live. Research embedded in growth — high visibility, high impact. Salary posted upfront. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 New York, NY | 💰 $180K–$272K Still live. Staff-level. Strong salary band. Duolingo is one of the few consumer tech companies that has always taken research seriously. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 Pittsburgh, PA | 💰 $180K–$272K Same role, same comp — different location. Pittsburgh is often less competitive for the same tier of role. 👉 Apply directly here

Delivery Hero — Senior UX Researcher 📍 Riyadh, SA Delivery Hero is one of the largest food delivery platforms in the world, operating across 70+ countries. This role is in Riyadh — worth noting upfront. If you’re open to the region, it’s a serious research function. 👉 Apply directly here

Canva — User Insights Analyst, Voice of Customers 📍 Makati, PH Research embedded in customer insights — a different entry point into Canva’s research org. Good role if you’re in the Philippines or open to it. 👉 Apply directly here

Wise — UX Research Specialist 📍 London, GB Wise (formerly TransferWise) has a strong product culture and a track record of building genuinely useful things. The title leads with CRM, but the role is research — worth reading the full JD. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles came out of my crawler, which pulls directly from company ATS systems — Greenhouse, Ashby, and now SmartRecruiters — before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles show up here days before, or never show up at all, on LinkedIn or Indeed.

I verify every link before it reaches you. If a button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

This is a curated list on purpose. I’d rather give you 9 real roles than 40 dead ends.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals, as well as leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, drop a comment. I’m planning to add junior and contract roles soon.

What’s Coming

The pipeline runs weekly. Next list goes out Tuesday morning in the same format, with new verified roles as they become available.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated, that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

Liz McDermitt CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

That’s not intel. That’s wasted time. And I lost their trust.

So I stopped posting. And I started building.

40+ hours. A custom job crawler that pulls directly from company hiring systems — the ones that rarely syndicate to LinkedIn or Indeed. A verification layer that confirms every apply button is live before a role ever reaches you.

I’m a leadership coach, not an engineer. This was new territory. I made mistakes, but I kept going anyway.

Every role below was verified live this morning. Apply buttons confirmed. No dead ends.

The List

OpenAI — Quantitative UX Researcher 📍 Remote A rare quantitative-focused UXR role at one of the most consequential AI companies right now. Not on LinkedIn. 👉 Apply directly here

Notion — User Researcher, Growth 📍 San Francisco or New York, NY | 💰 $185K–$220K Research embedded in growth — high visibility, high impact. Salary posted upfront, which tells you something about the culture. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 New York, NY | 💰 $181K–$272K Staff-level. Strong salary band. Duolingo is one of the few consumer tech companies that has always taken research seriously. 👉 Apply directly here

Duolingo — Staff Product Researcher 📍 Pittsburgh, PA | 💰 $181K–$272K Same role, same comp — different location. Pittsburgh is often less competitive for the same tier of role. Worth a serious look if you’re open to it. 👉 Apply directly here

A Few Things Worth Knowing

These roles came out of my crawler, which pulls directly from company ATS systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby) before they hit any job board. Most of the time, these roles show up here days before — or never show up at all — on LinkedIn or Indeed.

I verify every link manually before it reaches you. If a button is broken or the role is filled, it doesn’t make the list.

This is a small list on purpose. I’d rather give you 4 real roles than 40 dead ends.

Who This Is For

Senior and staff UXR professionals — and leaders who came up through research and want to stay close to the work. If you’re earlier in your career, I’ll start including junior and contract roles in future posts. Drop a comment if that’s you.

What’s Coming

I run this pipeline weekly. The next post goes out Tuesday morning — same format, new verified roles.

If you want it in your inbox, subscribe below. It’s free.

Subscribe now

And if you’re a UXR professional navigating a job search while also managing your visibility, confidence, or the politics of being underestimated — that’s what I do as a coach. Let’s talk.

— Liz CPCC | ACC | Kellogg MBA | Former Sr. Manager UX Research, Meta | Director, USAA

Let’s Get Glowing. ✨

Platypus Coaching | platypus-coaching.net

They revisit their portfolios. They refine how they tell their story. They become more deliberate about where and how they apply. The underlying belief is straightforward: if the inputs improve, the outcomes will follow.

It is a reasonable assumption. It is also, in many cases, incomplete.

Because when you observe enough of these searches at once, a different pattern begins to take shape—one that is difficult to explain through individual performance alone.

These are not early-career candidates struggling to demonstrate baseline competence. Many have led research programs, influenced product direction, and built credibility within complex organizations. They are accustomed to ambiguity. They know how to generate insight in environments where information is partial and evolving.

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And yet, in the current hiring market, they encounter a system that behaves in ways that are unusually difficult to interpret.

Applications are submitted and disappear without response. Interview processes shift depending on the company, and sometimes even within the same company. Feedback, when it arrives, is often too general to support meaningful adjustment. Outcomes appear uneven, occasionally contradictory, and not always correlated with observable experience or capability.

The prevailing explanation is that the market is competitive, and that candidates must continue refining how they present themselves.

But taken in aggregate, the data suggests something else may also be true.

The system itself is weakly signaled.

If this way of looking at the job market resonates, I write about navigating it as a system—not a performance problem.

In most well-functioning environments, inputs and outputs maintain some degree of coherence. Effort does not guarantee success, but patterns are legible. Over time, it is possible to learn which actions meaningfully influence outcomes.

In this case, that relationship is far less stable. Similar candidates receive different results. Stated requirements do not consistently align with selection decisions. The criteria by which candidates are evaluated remain largely implicit.

For people trained in research, this creates a familiar kind of tension.

It is difficult to calibrate within a system that does not produce reliable feedback.

In most domains, that would be treated as a design problem. In hiring, it is more often treated as an individual one.

Candidates respond accordingly. They adjust what they can see. They iterate on materials. They attempt to infer expectations from limited data. In the absence of clear signals, they increase effort, sometimes significantly.

This is a predictable response. It is also, under these conditions, not always an effective one.

In product environments, when a system is difficult to use, users compensate. They click more carefully. They reread instructions. They try to anticipate what the system is asking of them. When those efforts fail to produce consistent results, they tend to assume error on their part.

A similar pattern is visible here.

High-capacity candidates who are accustomed to solving complex problems begin to over-function inside an experience that does not reliably reward that effort. Over time, this produces a quieter but more consequential shift: a growing uncertainty about their own read on the situation.

Not because their capability has changed, but because the system offers little reinforcement that would allow them to trust it.

If the job search is reframed as an experience to be studied, rather than a process to optimize against, the questions begin to change.

The focus moves away from: How can I improve my performance within this system?To: What kind of system is this, and how does it behave?

From that perspective, several patterns become more visible.

Signal is unevenly distributed, often concentrated in networks, timing, and internal context rather than in formal application channels. Job descriptions function as approximations, not precise representations. Feedback loops are weak, limiting the ability to iterate with confidence. Outcomes are influenced by variables that remain largely out of view.

None of this is unusual for a complex system. What is unusual is how rarely it is described as one.

UX researchers, more than most, are equipped to work within these conditions. They are trained to distinguish signal from noise, to form hypotheses under uncertainty, and to avoid overfitting to limited data. These are not new skills. What is less common is applying them to the structure of one’s own career navigation.

Treating the job market as a UX problem does not resolve its inconsistencies. It does, however, offer a more accurate frame for understanding them.

And in doing so, it shifts the locus of the problem.

If outcomes are difficult to predict, it may not be because candidates are failing to perform. It may be because the system itself is not designed to produce clarity.

That distinction matters.

Because one invites endless self-correction while the other invites investigation. And, eventually, redesign.

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If you’re trying to make sense of a job market that feels inconsistent or hard to read, this is one of the topics I write about.
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