Senior or Staff User Researcher

Harvey, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 159,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Harvey is building the future of AI for legal professionals, and we’re seeking a seasoned User Researcher to join our research function. You are a senior contributor who drives high-impact research across multiple teams and helps shape problem definitions and roadmaps.

You will collaborate with research, design, product, and Eng leadership to accelerate user-centered AI products, translating user truths into strategic direction and tooling improvements.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of user research experience in digital products.
• Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, HCI, or related field; advanced degree preferred.
• Portfolio showing impact across product strategy with mixed methods.
• Navigate ambiguous problems with strong execution and judgment.
• Exceptional storytelling and cross-functional influencing skills.
• Experience building or customizing internal tooling to accelerate insights.
• Strong design judgment and business acumen; contribute to product reviews.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach enabling fast, thoughtful work.

Responsibilities

• Lead Complex Research Programs across teams and initiatives.
• Shape Product Thinking by partnering with PMs and Designers.
• Raise the Bar on Craft with clear synthesis and storytelling.
• Operate as a Trusted Partner to drive research rigor and alignment.

Skills

User research

Storytelling

Cross-functional collaboration

Strategic thinking

AI tooling

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, HCI, or related field

Advanced degree preferred

Tools

Zapier workflows

Claude skills

Notion workflows

Custom GPTs / research agents

Job description

Why Harvey

At Harvey, we’re transforming how legal and professional services operate. By combining frontier agentic AI, an enterprise-grade platform, and deep domain expertise, we’re reshaping how critical knowledge work gets done for decades to come.

This is a rare chance to help build a generational company at a true inflection point. We have strong product-market fit and world-class investor support. We’re scaling fast and defining a new category in real time. The work is ambitious, the bar is high, and the opportunity for growth — personal, professional, and financial — is unmatched.

Our team moves fast, takes ownership, and is deeply committed to the mission — operating with intensity, staying close to our customers, and pushing each other for excellence. We live by three values: Decisiveness, Simplicity, and Job's Not Finished. We act quickly on clear judgment over perfect information, we believe simplicity is what scales, and we're never satisfied with where we are. If you want to do the best work of your career alongside people who share that drive, we'd love to build with you.

At Harvey, the future of professional services is being written today — and we’re just getting started.

Role Overview

Harvey is building the future of AI for legal professionals, and understanding our users is core to how we do that. We are looking for a seasoned strategic User Researcher to join our research function. You are a senior individual contributor who drives high-impact research across multiple teams or a major product area. You move beyond single studies to shape problem definition, influence roadmaps, and elevate research quality through strong craft and partnership. You are comfortable with AI technologies and excited to build research and insight tooling to accelerate our workflows.

Success looks like teams meaningfully change direction based on your insights and influencing roadmap, research quality improves in the teams you support, and you are trusted as a strategic partner and moves at speed, where Harvey builds shared conviction around user truths.

This role directly reports to the Head of User Research and focuses on accelerating the quality and speed at which Harvey ships user-centered AI products. You have the opportunity to co-create tooling or identify the right capabilities to strengthen our research practice. You'll partner closely with research and design leadership, cross-functional stakeholders that keep research and insights running at peak efficiency.

It's a rare opportunity to shape how a category-defining AI company shapes its products from the ground up.

What You'll Do

Lead Complex Research Programs

• Own research strategy for a product area or cross-team initiative

• Design and execute end-to-end qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research

• Identify patterns across studies and connect insights to product decisions

• Research how legal professionals work with Harvey and outside of the platform. Translate that into product and design recommendations.

Shape Product Thinking

• Partner closely with Product Managers and Designers to frame the right problems

• Influence roadmaps by surfacing unmet user needs, risks, and opportunities

• Push teams beyond validation toward deeper discovery

• Develop strong legal domain expertise and excited to become an expert in both the Harvey product and the legal industry

Raise the Bar on Craft

• Produce clear, compelling synthesis and storytelling

• Identify where AI reduces friction in research process and comfortable building custom scripts, integrations, or AI agents where off-the-shelf tools fall short

• Model strong research rigor, ethics, and judgment

• Ability to prototype and ship research insight tooling improvements yourself before pulling in Eng support

Operate as a Trusted Partner

• Bring rigor to ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where the underlying technology (and user expectations of it) shift quickly

• Influence without authority across teams

• Help partners develop stronger research instincts

What You Have

• 5+ years of user research experience of digital products in fast-paced, high-growth or technically complex environments

• Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Factors, Cognitive Science, or a related field required. Advanced degree preferred

• Track record or portfolio of portfolio-level impact. Experience conducting and defining user research methodologies, integrating qualitative and quantitative insights into design and product strategy.

• Demonstrated ability to navigate and simplify multifaceted, ambiguous problem spaces while maintaining a high bar for execution.

• Exceptional storytelling and communication skills—capable of influencing cross-functional partners and aligning diverse perspectives.

• Experience building or customizing internal tooling (Zapier workflows, Claude skills, Notion workflows, and custom GPTs or research agents) to support insight acceleration.

• Strong design and product judgment and business acumen. Ability to engage deeply in design critiques and dedicated product area roadmap reviews to contribute insights into planning.

• A collaborative, low-ego approach that helps teams move quickly, thoughtfully, and inclusively

• Experience researching AI-powered technology products, and understand how to assess experiences and quality of conversational products.

Compensation

$158,500 - $264,500

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Harvey is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made by emailing [e-mail]