Senior Technical Design Researcher, Pixel, AI Systems and Hardware

Google; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 159,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

At Google, a User Experience Researcher (UXR) will join a multi-disciplinary UX team to gather insights and create industry-leading products. You will work with Engineering and Product Management to understand user needs and drive impact at all stages of development, ensuring products are useful and usable.

You will conduct field studies, interviews, diary studies, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and logs analysis, growing within a supportive UXR community.

Qualifications

• Must have a Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum of 6 years in applied research (product or academic).
• Experience with research methods (usability, studies, interviews, etc.).
• Masters degree in AI/CS/engineering or related field preferred.
• 6 years in hardware prototypes or interactive systems development preferred.
• Experience leading qualitative research in ambiguous spaces.
• Experience with hardware sensing and integration and prototyping.

Responsibilities

• Embed AI-forward research approaches and agentic workflows into research processes.
• Co-design across the full AI stack and develop/test prototypes with real users.
• Collaborate with Google teams to define Pixel intelligence experiences.
• Apply first-principles thinking to deconstruct challenges.

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.

6 years of experience in an applied research setting

Experience with research methods

Experience driving qualitative research

Experience with hardware and sensor integration

Programming to independently engineer prototypes

Experience building AI tools including agentic workflows

Tools

AI tooling

Job description

Minimum qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 6 years of experience in an applied research setting (e.g., product or academic), or similar.
• Experience with research methods (e.g., usability, studies, contextual inquires, 1:1 interviews, unmoderated research studies).

Preferred qualifications

• Master's degree in AI, computer science, electrical/computer engineering, design engineering, AI engineering, robotics, or a related field.
• 6 years of experience building physical hardware prototypes, interactive systems, or working in research and development.
• Experience driving qualitative research and human-computer interaction initiatives within ambiguous problem spaces.
• Experience with hardware and sensor integration, and programming to independently engineer and build functional physical prototypes.
• Experience building AI tools including agentic workflows and automation.

About The Job

At Google, we "Focus on the user and all else will follow." As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), you make this possible. You will join our multi-disciplinary UX team, collaborating with Engineering and Product Management, to gather insights and create industry-leading products.

You’ll play a critical role in helping your team understand user needs and will drive impact at all stages of product development, ensuring products are useful, usable, and helpful. You will explore user behaviors and motivations by conducting primary research, including: field studies, interviews, diary studies, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and logs analysis. You will also grow within a supportive UXR community offering mentorship, regular meetups, and exclusive internal tools.

In this role, you will collaborate with teams across Google to define what Pixel intelligence means by co-designing experiences across the full AI stack from compute capabilities to user interface. You will independently prototype future-forward concepts and evaluate them with real users.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our Devices & Services team combines the best of Google AI, Software, and Hardware to create radically helpful experiences for users. We research, design, and develop new technologies and hardware to make our user's interaction with computing faster, seamless, and more powerful. Whether finding new ways to capture and sense the world around us, advancing form factors, or improving interaction methods, the Devices & Services team is making people's lives better through technology.

Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

US: $159000 - $230000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits

Responsibilities

Learn more about benefits at Google .

• Employ an AI-forward research approach by embedding agentic workflows and AI tooling into research processes to accelerate execution and ensure scalability.
• Build new UX experiences while co-designing across the full AI stack (e.g., intelligent interfaces, sensing, and compute). Develop and test prototypes that explore technical trade-offs (e.g., cloud vs. on-device inference).
• Explore novel UX opportunities and create physical, testable prototypes for user evaluation.
• Apply first-principles thinking to challenge the status quo and deconstruct challenges to fundamental truths.

Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also Google's EEO Policy and EEO is the Law. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form .