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Role: Lead Usability Analyst (UX Researcher)
Location: Occasional travel to San Francisco, CA
Type: 12 months+
Hourly Rate: $55/HR on W2.
Candidates Should be located in California. This is W2 Contract role

As a Lead Usability Analyst (UX Researcher), you’ll lead design research across web, apps, in-store digital experiences, and emerging AI-enabled touchpoints, advocating for user needs throughout the product development cycle. As part of the User Experience team, you’ll partner cross-functionally to shape strategy, improve client experiences, and evolve research practices with AI tooling—while maintaining rigor, participant trust, and client privacy.

Responsibilities:
Core research:
Lead high-impact studies end-to-end, using sound research judgment to choose the right approach for the question at hand.
Conduct foundational research to inform product and design strategy across complex, high-priority initiatives.
Analyze data from qualitative studies including usability tests, interviews, participatory design, and heuristic evaluations; synthesize findings with quantitative and behavioral data.
Translate research findings into actionable insights and specific design recommendations.
Connect research signals across projects to identify patterns, synergies, and broader opportunities.
Communicate insights through clear storytelling that makes complex research actionable for partners from developers to executives.

AI-enabled ways of working:
Use approved AI tools to accelerate study setup, analysis, synthesis, desk research, survey drafting, and reporting while maintaining rigor, researcher judgment, and accountability for conclusions.
Design research for AI-driven experiences, including agentic, conversational, and personalized AI features.
Evaluate AI experiences for usability, trust, transparency, and the difference between what users say they want and how they actually behave.
Contribute to responsible-AI practice in research — sound handling of participant data and PII, awareness of model limitations and bias, appropriate disclosure, and human validation of AI-generated outputs before they inform decisions.
Help maintain a well-organized, easily accessible, and increasingly AI-queryable knowledge base of past research (e.g., searchable insight repositories), so prior learnings are discoverable and reusable across teams and tools.
Connect research insights to shared product, design, and engineering workflows so evidence reaches partners where they work.

Leadership & adaptability:
Act as a thought partner in discovery, strategy, and problem framing.
Navigate ambiguity across project priorities, concurrent workstreams, and problem spaces, bringing clarity to changing scope, user needs, and decisions.
Mentor researchers and designers in a user-centered process; help raise the bar on methodology, AI-enabled practice, and insight quality across the team.
Evaluate emerging research methods, AI tools, and ways of working; help the team adopt what adds value and phase out what does not.

Qualifications
Portfolio of digital product research, with experience across mobile and/or omnichannel experiences.
5–8+ years of experience in UX research, product research, or a related research role.
Practical experience using research tools, AI-enabled workflows, or emerging methods to improve research quality, speed, or impact.
Experience leading complex research initiatives that influence product, design, and cross-functional strategy.
Excels in a culture grounded in Sephora values: Passion for Client Service, Innovation, Expertise, Balance, Respect for All, Teamwork, and Initiative.