Senior Technical Design Researcher, Pixel, AI Systems and Hardware at Google Mountain View, CA

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

Job summary

Google seeks a User Experience Researcher to join a multidisciplinary UX team to gather insights and shape industry-leading products. You will conduct field studies, interviews, and usability tests to understand user needs and inform design decisions.

You will prototype future experiences across the AI stack and evaluate them with real users, collaborating with Engineering and Product Management. The role emphasizes turning qualitative insights into tangible product improvements, mentoring

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 inquiries, 1:1 interviews, unmoderated research studies).

Responsibilities

• Conduct primary research to understand user needs, behaviors, and motivations through field studies, interviews, diaries, ethnography, surveys, and usability testing.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Product Management to translate insights into actionable product requirements.
• Prototype and evaluate UX concepts across the AI stack, from compute to interface, with real users.
• Lead and grow a UX research community, mentoring others and sharing tools and learnings.

Skills

Usability research

Contextual inquiries

Interviews

Diary studies

Surveys

Logs analysis

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Master's degree preferred

Job description

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.

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.

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 Learn more about benefits at Google.

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).