Design Research Operations — Level

Position: (USA) Design Research Operations — Staff Level

Position Summary

At Sam’s Club, we’re committed to being the membership you love the most. The Sam's Club Experience Design team crafts compelling experiences wherever we meet our members and associates from our clubs to their businesses, and to their homes. We deliver impact for the business through the web, apps, in-club experiences and associate-facing tools.

We’re looking for a resourceful self-starter with an operational mindset, a passion for user research, and the ability to build efficient systems in a complex, high‑volume environment. If you’re energized by cultivating a culture of experimentation and learning across cross‑functional teams—and by growing the organization’s empathy and research capability—we’d love to meet you.

What you’ll do In This Role

As a member of the Design Research team, you’ll wear many hats and build scalable processes from the ground up to ensure the team can run smoothly and focus on generating deep, high‑quality insights. This is a net‑new role, and the person stepping into it will help define, and continually refine, the operational backbone of our research practice as it grows.

Guided by design‑thinking principles, Research Ops will evolve iteratively alongside the team, maturing processes, enabling experimentation at scale, and increasing the impact and visibility of research across the organization.

Responsibilities Research Planning

• Partner with research leadership to plan upcoming work and future studies.
• Manage research backlogs and ensure priorities are documented, aligned, and actionable.
• Track research studies across the portfolio to ensure visibility, progress, and shared learnings.

Participant Recruitment & Research Support

• Build and maintain scalable systems for managing participant pools across studies.
• Lead participant recruitment strategy and operations, including sourcing, scheduling, incentives, NDAs, and participant experience.
• Ensure research ethics, privacy, and consent standards are understood and upheld; develop processes that help the organization to adhere to best practices.

Standardize Research Processes

• Build and oversee a program to train designers to run their own studies with confidence and rigor.
• Create, maintain, and standardize research methods and documentation—scripts, templates, consent forms, playbooks, and best practice guides.
• Develop protocols and standards for effect testing and other experimental methods with the research team.
• Coordinate the setup and ongoing operations of an in‑person lab space for rapid prototyping and concept testing.

Tools & Infrastructure

• Manage contracts, renewals, and onboarding for all research tools and platforms.
• Continuously improve tooling and processes to remove friction for researchers and increase efficiency.
• Explore and establish best practices for the use of GenAI in research and workflow processes.

Insight Management & Socialization

• Help establish systems for insight storage, retrieval, tagging, and long‑term knowledge sharing.
• Work with the team to socialize success stories and communicate the impact of user research across the business.
• Partner with researchers to educate product, design, and business stakeholders about the value of research and how to engage effectively.

Team Enablement & Onboarding

• Design and deliver onboarding experiences for new members of the Experience Research team.
• Support team rituals, community‑building efforts, and research practice development.

What you’ll bring

• Experience in Research Ops, Design Ops, UX Research, or an equivalent role supporting research at scale.
• Strong organizational and systems‑thinking skills; ability to bring clarity, order, and frameworks to ambiguity.
• Familiarity with research methods, ethics, participant recruitment, and experimentation.
• Ability to build relationships and partner effectively across design, product, engineering, and operations.
• Comfort working in environments where processes are emerging and evolving.
• A mindset oriented toward service, collaboration, iteration, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in Research Operations, Design Operations, UX Research, or related operational role…