Senior Design Researcher (12 month fixed term contract)
Auckland, NZ / Wellington, NZ
Product – Design /
Fixed Term /
Hybrid
Our Purpose
At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
About the role
As a Senior Design Researcher, you’ll independently run impactful qualitative and quantitative research projects that connect cross-functional & senior stakeholders to key customer challenges. You will work closely with your Design and cross-functional peers in our Payments space, uncovering meaningful insights for our teams.
Through understanding and collaborating around customer needs, you’ll deliver clear insights and recommendations that inspire change. Your work ensures Xero’s product and experience improvements are grounded in a deep understanding of our customers.
This role is a 12-month parental leave cover and can be based either in Auckland or Wellington.
What you'll do
- Applying suitable research methodologies, you'll independently lead evaluative and generative research projects. You’ll design and conduct effective interviews to uncover rich, meaningful insights and generate informative data.
- You’re confident crafting insightful surveys and harnessing data to recognise trends.
- Leveraging your strong planning skills, you’ll prioritise tasks, manage constraints, communicate progress and proactively manage change.
- You’ll proactively seek to understand the business context and interrogate research requests in order to pragmatically apply the appropriate research approach.
- You’re skilled in identifying patterns and interpreting findings. Collaborating across teams, you'll incorporate cross functional research, external research and industry trends to supplement your research insights.
- You'll craft concise, compelling presentations and confidently deliver clear, actionable recommendations that influence stakeholders and shape roadmaps.
- You'll proactively contribute to the research practice. Advocating for research across the organization, you’ll build capability within the broader team, and champion ethical, inclusive and AI supported research practices. .
What you'll bring with you
- A degree or training in a design research course — or equivalent portfolio of work to match.
- A portfolio of work that demonstrates high-quality and influential communication of insights, highlighting the business impact.
- Experience working on large complex design and research projects.
- Experience working on large, complex design and research programs, encompassing the entire design research process.
- A foundational understanding of AI/ML systems, their capabilities, limitations, and ethical implications and a demonstrated ability to integrate efficiencies into the research workflow.
- Ideally, experience applying user centred design to products or services.
Why Xero?
Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, free medical insurance, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.
