Principal Researcher

Does this position interest you? You should apply - even if you don't match every single requirement! We're known as an auto glass company. That's the focus of what we do. But beyond the glass, we're so much more. We'll help you build a fulfilling career and encourage you to have a life. Let us be the best place you'll ever work.

Safelite is the leader in auto glass service, continuously raising the bar for experiences that are easy, fast, and done. Digital is central to that ambition and to how we serve consumers, clients, and colleagues.

• Shape the questions that matter

  • Lead foundational and strategic research that informs product strategy, experience direction, and investment.
  • Identify the questions where deeper customer understanding can change the direction of the work.
  • Bring customer, client, and colleague understanding into roadmap, planning, and product strategy as an ongoing input, not a final validation step.
  • Connect qualitative research, behavioral data, voice of customer, and operational signals to build a richer and more current understanding of the experience.

• Raise the quality of research

  • Set the research practice across methods, standards, participant engagement, ethics, consent, and knowledge management.
  • Create clear standards and lightweight systems that make high-quality research easier to do across the organization.
  • Enable designers and product managers to run effective discovery themselves, with the right guidance, tools, and guardrails.
  • Mentor researchers, designers, and product managers on framing questions, choosing methods, conducting research, interpreting evidence, and applying what they learn.
  • Use AI and emerging research methods to increase learning velocity while protecting the rigor and judgment that make the learning trustworthy.

• Turn understanding into direction

  • Translate research into frameworks, narratives, and decision tools that help teams determine what to do next.
  • Bring evidence and a clear point of view to senior leaders, including when the research challenges an existing assumption or direction.
  • Connect insights across studies and over time so teams see patterns in customer behavior and needs, not a collection of individual findings.
  • Track how research changes decisions, priorities, and outcomes, and use that feedback to continuously improve the practice.

• Advance research for AI-enabled experiences

  • Explore how customers, clients, and colleagues interact with conversational, agentic, and adaptive experiences.
  • Study how trust, expectations, control, transparency, recovery, and handoff change as experiences become more dynamic.
  • Partner with product and design teams to evaluate AI-enabled experiences using real customer behavior and conversations.
  • Develop research approaches for experiences that adapt based on the customer, context, and interaction.
• Performs other duties as assigned
• Complies with all policies and standards

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent work experience Required
• 10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience in a product organization.

• 10+ years of user research, design research, behavioral research, or related experience in a product organization.

  • Deep fluency across qualitative and quantitative research methods, with strong judgment about which approach fits the question and decision.
  • A track record of research that materially influenced product, experience, or business direction.
  • Experience building or significantly advancing a research practice, including scalable and democratized discovery models.
  • Experience mentoring researchers, designers, and product managers on research craft and judgment.
  • Strong experience using behavioral and digital analytics alongside qualitative research, with platforms such as Quantum Metric, Heap, Amplitude, Full Story, or similar.
  • Demonstrated fluency using AI across study design, synthesis, analysis, pattern finding, and communication.
  • Experience working in continuous discovery and delivery environments where learning actively shapes what gets built next.
  • Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguity and…