About the role

We are looking for a Senior (UX) Research Operations expert with significant experience (5+ years) in Research Operations who can help build and mature the operational backbone of UX Research at FedEx Digital.

Your mission is to make UX Research easier to run, easier to access, easier to reuse, and easier to connect to product and business decisions. You will work closely with UX Researchers, Product, Design, Data, Analytics, Legal, Procurement, Privacy, Marketing, and business stakeholders to create the systems and processes that help research scale responsibly across a large enterprise environment.

You will help researchers spend less time on operational friction and more time on strategic research, stakeholder influence, and customer understanding.

This role is ideal for someone who understands research craft, but is especially strong in research infrastructure, participant recruitment, tooling, process design, research governance, knowledge management, vendor management, AI-enabled workflows, and insight activation.

What you will be doing

Research operations strategy and infrastructure

• Define and evolve the Research Operations strategy for the UX Research team.
• Build scalable processes that support research planning, intake, prioritization, recruitment, consent, documentation, synthesis, reporting, and insight sharing.
• Identify operational pain points in the research lifecycle and design practical improvements.
• Help create consistent ways of working without adding unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Support the team in moving from project-by-project research execution toward more scalable, reusable research systems.

Research planning, intake, and prioritization

• Help design and maintain research intake and prioritization processes.
• Support researchers and stakeholders in clarifying research needs, urgency, business relevance, and decision impact.
• Create templates, workflows, and guidance that help teams scope research more effectively.
• Partner with UXR leadership to create visibility into research demand, team capacity, coverage, and priorities.
• Help identify opportunities to reduce duplicated work and connect related research needs across Hives and Programs.

Participant recruitment and research logistics

• Own or improve participant recruitment operations, including panel management, vendor workflows, screener processes, scheduling, incentives, and participant communications.
• Ensure recruitment processes are efficient, inclusive, ethical, and compliant with privacy and legal requirements.
• Partner with researchers to improve participant quality and reduce recruitment friction.
• Manage or coordinate relationships with recruitment vendors and research platforms.
• Help establish standards for participant data handling, consent, and retention.

Tooling, vendors, and research systems

• Own or support the research tool ecosystem, including tools for recruitment, testing, interviews, surveys, repositories, transcription, synthesis, and reporting.
• Evaluate, implement, and manage research tools and vendor relationships.
• Partner with Procurement, Legal, Privacy, Security, and IT to onboard and govern research tools responsibly.
• Create guidance and training so researchers and partners can use tools consistently and effectively.
• Monitor tool adoption, gaps, risks, and opportunities for improvement.

Research repository and knowledge management

• Improve how research insights are stored, tagged, discovered, reused, and activated.
• Help build and maintain research repositories, taxonomies, tagging systems, and insight libraries.
• Create processes that make research knowledge easier to find across teams, Hives, and product areas.
• Support the creation of reusable outputs such as one-pagers, insight summaries, strategic signals, and trend reports.
• Help connect research findings across studies to identify recurring customer themes, journey pain points, and opportunity areas.

Governance, quality, ethics, and compliance

• Help define standards and guardrails for responsible, high-quality UX Research.
• Support research ethics, privacy, consent, accessibility, inclusion, and data protection practices.
• Create practical guidance for research documentation, participant data handling, recording, storage, and retention.
• Partner with Legal, Privacy, Security, and Compliance teams where needed.
• Help ensure research operations enable speed without compromising trust, quality, or ethical practice.

AI-enabled Research Operations

• Explore and implement responsible AI-enabled workflows that improve research efficiency, quality, and scalability.
• Identify where AI can support research operations, such as intake triage, planning support, transcript handling, synthesis workflows, repository search, insight summarization, and reporting.
• Define practical guardrails for AI use in research, including quality control, bias, privacy, confidentiality, and human review.
• Help the team build shared AI practices, prompts, templates, and workflows.
• Ensure AI is used to support -not replace- research judgment, ethical standards, and customer understanding.

Team enablement and research maturity

• Create training, onboarding materials, playbooks, templates, and best-practice guidance for researchers and cross-functional partners.
• Help onboard new researchers into tools, processes, repositories, and ways of working.
• Support a culture of research excellence, reuse, transparency, and operational discipline.
• Partner with UXR leadership to track and communicate the value, reach, and impact of research.
• Help increase the visibility of UX Research across the organization through better systems, reporting, and insight activation.

What you will also be doing

While this is primarily a Research Operations role, you will also stay closely connected to the research craft and the product teams we support. You will help ensure that our Research Operations work directly improves the quality, consistency, and impact of UX Research across Shipping and other digital journeys.

You will also:

• Partner closely with UX Researchers supporting multiple Shipping product teams.
• Support end-to-end research projects by improving the processes, tools, templates, recruitment flows, and operational structures around them.
• Help researchers and product teams identify customer needs, pain points, assumptions, and opportunities across the shipping journey.
• Support the use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods by making research planning, execution, synthesis, and reporting more efficient and consistent.
• Help translate research findings into clear recommendations, reusable outputs, compelling stories, and strategic product direction.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Data, Analytics, Marketing, and business stakeholders to improve how research is planned, shared, and activated.
• Facilitate or support workshops, opportunity mapping sessions, co-creation sessions, and prioritization discussions.
• Help teams connect customer insights to product opportunities, business outcomes, and long-term strategy.
• Explore and apply AI-enabled research workflows to improve speed, quality, scalability, and insight reuse.
• Help define responsible AI practices for UX Research, including guardrails around quality, bias, privacy, confidentiality, ethics, and human judgment.

What you bring with you

Core Research Operations expertise

• Significant experience (5+ years) in Research Operations
• Proven ability to build scalable operational systems for research teams in complex organizations.
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end UX Research lifecycle.
• Experience with participant recruitment, vendor management, research logistics, tooling, repositories, governance, and research enablement.
• Ability to design processes that are practical, lightweight, and adopted by teams.
• Strong project management, program management, and organizational skills.
• Experience managing multiple workstreams, stakeholders, tools, and operational dependencies.

UX Research understanding

• Solid understanding of qualitative and quantitative UX Research methods.
• Ability to understand researcher needs and translate them into better systems, processes, and workflows.
• Experience working closely with UX Researchers, Product Managers, Designers, Data Analysts, and business stakeholders.
• Ability to support research quality without needing to be the primary researcher on studies.
• Good understanding of research ethics, participant privacy, consent, and responsible handling of customer data.

Strategic and organizational skills

• Ability to operate independently in a multidisciplinary, international, corporate environment.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to identify root causes behind operational friction.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity, evolving requirements, and competing priorities.
• Ability to influence without direct authority.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Ability to balance standardization with flexibility across different teams and product areas.
• Experience creating operational visibility through dashboards, trackers, reports, or planning tools.

Tooling, data, and AI

• Experience working with research tools, repositories, recruitment platforms, survey tools, usability testing platforms, transcription tools, and/or insight management systems.
• Ability to evaluate and implement tools in partnership with Legal, Privacy, Security, Procurement, and IT.
• Interest in, and preferably hands-on experience with, AI-enabled research or operations workflows.
• Ability to critically evaluate where AI can add value and where human judgment, privacy, ethics, and quality control are essential.
• Curiosity about emerging technology, customer behavior, and the future of Research Operations.

Communication and collaboration

• Excellent communication skills for both research and non-research audiences.
• Strong facilitation skills and ability to align different stakeholder groups.
• Ability to create clear documentation, playbooks, guidance, and training materials.
• Proactive, hands-on, structured, and pragmatic working style.

Fluency in English, both written and spoken.
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What success looks like

In this role, success means that UX Research becomes easier to run, easier to scale, and more visible across the organization.

You will help create:

• More efficient research planning, recruitment, and execution workflows.
• Clearer research intake and prioritization.
• Better visibility into research demand, coverage, and capacity.
• More consistent tooling, templates, and governance.
• Stronger research knowledge management and insight reuse.
• Better connection between research findings and product decisions.
• Responsible AI-supported workflows that improve speed and quality.
• Less operational friction for researchers.
• Greater reach and influence of UX Research across FedEx Digital.

What do we offer

• Attractive compensation package.
• Training to get you started and on-the-job learning opportunities.