Lead UX Researcher, Descript
$166-225k
AI video & podcast editor
Open for applications
AI video & podcast editor
101-200 employees
Open for applications
$166-225k
101-200 employees
Company mission
To make it easy for anyone o record, edit, and share any video.
Role
Who you are
- If you’re excited about being part of a customer-obsessed culture, owning high-impact research and scaling its influence across a product org, we’d love to talk
- 5+ years of UX research experience
- Experience working closely with product and design teams (not purely agency role)
- Experience building out a collaborative research practice within a product org, where you’ve used your expertise to mentor or train others in how to conduct high-quality user research
- Experience building out and maintaining research operation systems for managing study participation, feedback, research recordings, and the insights gleaned from that research
- Track record of concretely influencing product and strategic decisions
- Ability to scale a research practice using AI tools while maintaining the integrity of the research
- Strong across both quantitative and qualitative UX research methods: your toolbox contains various tools to get to the most actionable insights (e.g., facilitating 1:1 calls with customers, conducting unmoderated research studies, short & long-form surveys, mining sales & support data, engaging with online communities)
- Excellent synthesis and storytelling from complex info and data
- Strong product sense and ability to turn noisy insights to clear, actionable decisions
- Strong organizational skills, with a drive to ensure research data is well-catalogued for easy future access
- Ability to operate with high autonomy for a wide range of activities, from research coordination to facilitation and synthesis, while balancing rigor with speed
What the job involves
- We’re hiring a lead UX researcher to shape product decisions and how we practice user research across Descript
- You’ll operate as a senior IC, owning ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end, while also helping teams get closer to users through better tools, systems, and habits
- This includes foundational and ethnographic research, improving how we synthesize and share insights, and enabling PMs and designers to run high-quality research themselves
- Descript serves a wide range of creators and enterprises with different workflows and goals. This role is key to helping us deeply understand those users, and ensure that understanding consistently drives product decisions
- Lead end-to-end UX research studies across large, ambiguous problem spaces
- Identify key unknowns and define the most appropriate research questions and methods to inform product decisions
- Conduct exploratory, evaluative, and longitudinal research (e.g. ethnography, usability, concept testing)
- Partner closely with PMs, designers, and product marketing, as well as data science, customer support, sales, and engineering, to ensure research is connected to both product decisions and real user feedback loops
- Develop a deep understanding of our customers, their creative goals, and the evolving AI video landscape — and use those insights to guide the product roadmap
- Study how people create content, both inside and outside of using Descript — map and maintain a library of workflows, mental models, and friction points across users and use cases
- Synthesize findings into clear, actionable outputs that drive decisions (e.g. frameworks, highlight reels, journey maps)
- Coach PMs and designers to plan and run their own research, and increase the number of teams able to run high-quality research independently
- Manage research operations systems, automating where possible, for participant recruitment, feedback management, and insight sharing
- Introduce new methods, tools, and rituals to improve how research is conducted, managed and shared
- Find creative and pragmatic ways to bring employees closer to the voice of the customer
- Host and manage programming for Insight Safari — a company-wide casual weekly gathering where we watch and discuss minimally edited user research footage together
Application process
- When applying, please put the word "analog" as the first word in your cover letter
Our take
The rise of digital content has made video and audio creation more important than ever, but producing polished media can still be quite complex. Descript makes editing accessible to anyone, simplifying recording, editing, and publishing. And its platform empowers over 7M users to bring ideas to life without needing advanced technical skills.
Descript's standout feature is its AI co-editor, Underlord, which lets users create and edit videos just by describing what they want,. It can generate rough cuts, add visuals and B-roll, apply AI effects, and format content for social media. While many creators are still wary of AI in content creation, Descript has built its tools to augment human creativity, giving users control while handling the heavy lifting.
Serving millions of creators and businesses worldwide, Descript keeps innovating with AI features that learn from user input. By combining intuitive tools with responsible AI, the platform is helping content creators work faster and smarter, reshaping video and audio production while keeping the creative vision firmly in human hands.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
30% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Oct 2022
$50m
SERIES C
Jan 2021
$30m
SERIES B
Total funding: $100m
Company benefits
- Health: We’ve got you covered with medical, dental, and vision benefits for all employees and their dependents. These include HMO and PPO healthcare plans
- Time off: Paid holidays are a given, but you can also expect flexible time off. Feel comfortable to take the time you need, when you need it.
- Parental leave: New parents receive paid parental leave to spend quality time with their expanding families.
- Home-office stipend: Get your work-from-home setup ready with our home-office stipend.
- Retirement: We offer a variety of retirement plans, including employer matching.
- Free food & refreshments: Come say hey! Visit our office for free lunch, snacks, and drinks.
- Destination off-sites: No matter where you work, you’ll get to know your team. We host two annual gatherings: a company-wide off-site and a team-specific off-site.
Company HQ
Civic Center, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Laura Burkhauser
(CEO)Laura joined Descript in 2023 as a VP of Product and became CEO in 2025. Prior to this, she was a Director of Product Management at Twitter and Rent The Runway.
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