UX Researcher

Scotiabank; Toronto; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs

Accessibility & workplace accomodation

Upskilling & tuition support

Competitive rewards & benefits

Job summary

Scotiabank is seeking a User Experience Researcher to partner with executives, designers, and product teams to frame the right questions and translate evidence into clear implications. The role blends strategic discovery with enabling operations to drive efficient research workflows across journeys, products, and client needs.

You will lead discovery research for ambiguous challenges, connect client needs to strategic decisions, and help teams improve tools and practices so researchers can work

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in UX research, design research, or related field.
• Experience in financial services or regulated environments is preferred.
• Demonstrated success leading discovery research and turning evidence into strategic direction.
• Hands-on experience with recruitment, surveys, tools, and reporting.

Responsibilities

• Lead discovery research for ambiguous or open-ended challenges from framing to activation.
• Design fit-for-purpose research using qualitative, quantitative, or participatory methods.
• Coordinate study logistics, vendors, and recruitments, and synthesize findings into actionable recommendations.
• Improve research processes, templates, and repositories for efficiency and reuse.

Skills

UX research

stakeholder partnership

systems thinking

discovery research

recruitment & incentives

research tooling

Job description

The Role

The User Experience Researcher helps digital and business teams understand clients, uncover opportunities, and make confident experience decisions. This hybrid research and operations role combines strategic thinking with practical enablement. You will both drive efficiency and logistics across our research process and teams, as well as lead discovery research for ambiguous, open-ended challenges, connecting evidence across journeys, products, and client needs. You will partner with executives, stakeholders, designers, and product teams to frame the right questions, translate evidence into clear implications, and improve the tools and practices that help researchers work efficiently and consistently.

Is this role right for you? In this role you will:

Strategic Discovery & Research

• Lead discovery research for holistic, ambiguous, or open-ended challenges, from framing through synthesis and activation.
• Use systems thinking to connect client needs, journeys, products, channels, and organizational factors.
• Design fit-for-purpose research, combining qualitative, quantitative, participatory, or innovative methods as needed.
• Proactively partner with executives and stakeholders to clarify questions, challenge assumptions, and align research to decisions.
• Turn complex evidence into clear insights, opportunity spaces, and recommendations that shape UX strategy and priorities.
• Facilitate internal workshops to extract priorities, align on direction and client ‘so-what’ and communicate findings with clarity, confidence, and appropriate evidence limitations.

Research Operations & Enablement

• Administer research tools, templates, and repositories so evidence is easy to capture, find, reuse, and connect across and beyond the UXR team
• Own the AI layer of the practice. Assisted synthesis and search across a governed evidence corpus, with the guardrails and quality checks that keep the outputs trustworthy rather than merely fast.
• Build, quality-check, launch, and monitor surveys in partnership with researchers and stakeholders.
• Help researchers improve the efficiency, clarity, and quality of plans, synthesis, reports, and documentation.
• Coordinate study logistics, vendors, schedules, consent materials, dependencies, and status updates.
• Improve workflows and shared standards to increase research quality, consistency, reuse, and speed.
• Build and run the enablement programme: curriculum, templates, coaching that let designers and product partners run sound research to our standard and with our review, extending capacity without extending headcount.
• Treat participant experience and inclusive sampling as a designed system, not a booking task: who we hear from, how often, how well we treat them, and whose voices are structurally missing from what we know.

Do you have the skills that will enable you to succeed in this role? We'd love to work with you if you have:

• 5+ years of experience in UX research, design research, service design, research operations, or an adjacent insight role.
• Experience in financial services, regulated industries, or adjacent complex service environments is preferred.
• Demonstrated success leading discovery research for complex or ambiguous questions and translating evidence into strategic direction.
• Hands-on experience with recruitment, incentives, research tools, repositories, surveys, and research reporting.
• Strong systems thinking, synthesis, facilitation, storytelling, and stakeholder partnership skills.
• A growth mindset, proactive approach, and strategic outlook, with the curiosity and confidence to navigate uncertainty and improve how research gets done.

What's in it for you?

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Allyship - We strive to create an inclusive culture where every employee is empowered to reach their fullest potential, respected for who they are, and are embraced through bias-free practices and inclusive values across Scotiabank.
• We embrace diversity and provide opportunities for all employees to learn, grow & participate through our various Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that span across diverse gender identities, ethnicity, race, age, ability & veterans.
• Accessibility and Workplace Accommodations - We value the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to the Bank and are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. Scotiabank continues to locate, remove and prevent barriers so that we can build a diverse and inclusive environment while meeting accessibility requirements.
• Upskilling through online courses, cross-functional development opportunities, and tuition assistance.
• Competitive Rewards program including bonus, flexible vacation, personal, sick days and benefits will start on day one.
  Community Engagement - no matter where you choose to work from; we offer opportunities for community engagement & belonging with our various programs such as hackathons, contests, Humans of Digital and much more!

Location(s): Canada : Ontario : Toronto

Scotiabank is a leading bank in the Americas. Guided by our purpose: "for every future", we help our customers, their families and their communities achieve success through a broad range of advice, products and services, including personal and commercial banking, wealth management and private banking, corporate and investment banking, and capital markets.

At Scotiabank, we value the unique skills and experiences each individual brings to the Bank, and are committed to creating and maintaining an inclusive and accessible environment for everyone. If you require accommodation (including, but not limited to, an accessible interview site, alternate format documents, ASL Interpreter, or Assistive Technology) during the recruitment and selection process, please let our Recruitment team know.