Principal Researcher

Safelite Group; Kentucky; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) matching

Medical coverage

PTO

Paid volunteer days

Tuition reimbursement

Job summary

Safelite Group is seeking a Principal Researcher to strengthen how the company understands customers, clients, and colleagues and to make that understanding a consistent input to product strategy and investment decisions.

Reporting to the Director of Product Design, you will lead the research practice as a senior individual contributor, shaping questions, guiding foundational work, and building scalable discovery practices.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience.
• Fluency in qualitative and quantitative research with good judgment.
• Track record of research influencing product or business direction.
• Experience building or advancing a research practice.
• Mentoring researchers, designers, and PMs on research craft.
• Strong experience using behavioral and digital analytics with tools like Quantum Metric/Heap/Amplitude/FullStory.
• Fluency with AI across study design, synthesis, and analysis.

Responsibilities

• Shape the questions that matter and lead strategic research informing product strategy.
• Identify questions where deeper customer understanding can change direction of work.
• Integrate customer insights into roadmaps and planning as ongoing input.
• Combine qualitative research, data, VOC, and operational signals for current understanding.
• Raise research quality and establish standards and guardrails across methods.
• Mentor researchers, designers, and PMs on framing questions and choosing methods.
• Partner with teams to evaluate AI-enabled experiences using real customer behavior.

Skills

User research

Research leadership

Mentoring

Qualitative methods

Quantitative methods

AI in research

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Quantum Metric

Heap

Amplitude

FullStory

Job description

A Brief Overview Safelite is the leader in auto glass service, continuously raising the bar for experiences that are easy, fast, and done. Digital is central to that ambition and to how we serve consumers, clients, and colleagues.

We are seeking a Principal Researcher to strengthen how Safelite understands customers, clients, and colleagues, and make that understanding a consistent input to product strategy and investment decisions.

Reporting to the Director of Product Design, you will lead the research practice as a senior individual contributor.

You will shape the questions we pursue, lead the research with the highest strategic value, and build the practices that help teams develop deeper customer understanding and make better decisions.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set the standard for research across the organization, mentor others in the craft, and stay close to the work, leading the complex research where judgment, depth, and experience matter most.

What you will do

• Shape the questions that matter
• Lead foundational and strategic research that informs product strategy, experience direction, and investment.
• Identify the questions where deeper customer understanding can change the direction of the work.
• Bring customer, client, and colleague understanding into roadmap, planning, and product strategy as an ongoing input, not a final validation step.
• Connect qualitative research, behavioral data, voice of customer, and operational signals to build a richer and more current understanding of the experience.
• Raise the quality of research
• Set the research practice across methods, standards, participant engagement, ethics, consent, and knowledge management.
• Create clear standards and lightweight systems that make high-quality research easier to do across the organization.
• Enable designers and product managers to run effective discovery themselves, with the right guidance, tools, and guardrails.
• Mentor researchers, designers, and product managers on framing questions, choosing methods, conducting research, interpreting evidence, and applying what they learn.
• Use AI and emerging research methods to increase learning velocity while protecting the rigor and judgment that make the learning trustworthy.
• Turn understanding into direction
• Translate research into frameworks, narratives, and decision tools that help teams determine what to do next.
• Bring evidence and a clear point of view to senior leaders, including when the research challenges an existing assumption or direction.
• Connect insights across studies and over time so teams see patterns in customer behavior and needs, not a collection of individual findings.
• Track how research changes decisions, priorities, and outcomes, and use that feedback to continuously improve the practice.
• Advance research for AI-enabled experiences
• Explore how customers, clients, and colleagues interact with conversational, agentic, and adaptive experiences.
• Study how trust, expectations, control, transparency, recovery, and handoff change as experiences become more dynamic.
• Partner with product and design teams to evaluate AI-enabled experiences using real customer behavior and conversations.
• Develop research approaches for experiences that adapt based on the customer, context, and interaction.
• Performs other duties as assigned
• Complies with all policies and standards

What you will need

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience in a product organization.
• Deep fluency across qualitative and quantitative research methods, with strong judgment about which approach fits the question and decision.
• A track record of research that materially influenced product, experience, or business direction.
• Experience building or significantly advancing a research practice, including scalable and democratized discovery models.
• Experience mentoring researchers, designers, and product managers on research craft and judgment.
• Strong experience using behavioral and digital analytics alongside qualitative research, with platforms such as Quantum Metric, Heap, Amplitude, FullStory, or similar.
• Demonstrated fluency using AI across study design, synthesis, analysis, pattern finding, and communication.
• Experience working in continuous discovery and delivery environments where learning actively shapes what gets built next.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguity and influence senior stakeholders with evidence.

What you will get

Competitive weekly pay and bonus opportunities. Total job benefits valued at more than $10k*. This includes a 401(k) plan with company matching, medical coverage plans customized to suit your needs and a commitment to work/life balance through our paid time off (PTO) programs, company holidays and paid volunteer days. Up to $5,250 in tuition reimbursement per year. View all our health, wealth and life offerings at www.safelitebenefits.com

This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by an employee occupying this position. Employees may be required to perform other related duties as assigned to ensure workload coverage. This job description does NOT constitute an employment agreement between the employer and employee and is subject to change by the employer as the organizational needs and requirements of the job change. This position description is not all inclusive for every aspect of this role.

Reasonable accommodations will be made for individuals covered by ADA, ADEA, FMLA and other laws and regulations in accordance with their requirements. Physical and mental demands are not, and should not be construed to be job qualification standards, but are illustrated to help the employer, employee and/or applicant identify tasks where reasonable accommodations may need to be made when an otherwise qualified person is unable to perform the job's essential duties because of an ADA disability. Other qualifications may be required to ensure employment eligibility in accordance with local laws, regulations and with Safelite Group, Inc. policies and practices.

Safelite® was founded in Wichita, Kansas in 1947. A leading service organization, the Safelite family of brands delivers our People Powered, Customer Driven experience to more than 11 million customers annually. Safelite® AutoGlass, the nation’s largest provider of vehicle glass repair, replacement and recalibration services, operates more than 700 stores and 7,900 MobileGlassShops™ across all 50 U.S. states, while Safelite® Solutions provides property and casualty claims management services to more than 175 insurance and fleet clients. All of this is supported through our technology-forward supply chain and corporate services.

We're People Powered: Our people come first. We care about your well-being and we'll give you what you need to have a happy work/life. We're good at what we do: we're proud of our 88% Net Promoter Score (NPS). We're big: We're owned by Belron®, the world's largest vehicle glass company, spanning 40 countries across 6 continents. We're trustworthy: We provide coverage to all U.S. drivers in all 50 states. We give back: Community service is important to us - we've even recycled 107K+ tons of glass to date. We're diverse: Safelite welcomes everyone. We value our diverse workforce and suppliers, and we're proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We don't discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by law, nor do we tolerate discrimination or harassment against our associates and clients.

Accessibility: Upon request and consistent with applicable laws, Safelite will provide reasonable accommodations to individuals who need assistance in the application/hiring process.

Privacy: To review and consider your application, Safelite collects personal information. To understand what is collected and why, carefully review the Applicant Privacy Notice presented during your online application and/or review our Applicant Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Agencies: Safelite does not accept unsolicited resumes or outreach from third-party recruiters. Absent a signed MSA and approval and request from Talent Acquisition to submit resumes for a specific requisition, we will not approve payment to any third party