Senior UX Researcher

American Express, UX Research shapes experiences grounded in deep customer understanding. Our team is entering a pivotal phase where Design and Research increasingly influence not only product development, but also business strategy and cross-functional decision-making. We are expanding our research capabilities to bring customer evidence into strategic conversations earlier, uncover emerging opportunities, and shape the future of connected, differentiated digital experiences.

We are seeking a Senior UX Researcher who combines exceptional qualitative research craft, strategic thinking, and research leadership. As a core partner to our Design Strategy team, this role will connect customer understanding with competitive intelligence, emerging trends, and business priorities to identify opportunities, inform future-state experiences, and influence strategic decisions before solutions are defined.

The ideal candidate is an accomplished strategic researcher with deep expertise in generative research, synthesis, and storytelling, and demonstrated experience partnering with service design, experience strategy, and innovation teams. They bring creativity, methodological rigor, and the ability to navigate ambiguity, challenge assumptions, influence senior leaders, and elevate the work of other researchers.

• Shape experience strategy through research: Independently lead complex, ambiguous research from problem framing through executive decision-making. Partner with Design Strategy, Product, and business leaders to establish forward-looking research agendas, uncover opportunities, and inform strategic priorities.

• Deliver exceptional generative and exploratory research: Design and lead rigorous qualitative research to uncover customer motivations, behaviors, unmet needs, and mental models. Apply expert methodological judgment to select and adapt approaches, including interviewing, contextual inquiry, longitudinal studies, and participatory research.

• Anticipate emerging needs and opportunities: Connect customer research with competitive intelligence, market trends, emerging technologies, and strategic foresight. Apply outside-in thinking and future-oriented research to anticipate changing expectations, identify whitespace opportunities, and inform differentiated experiences.

• Partner in strategic discovery and service design: Collaborate with experience strategists, service designers, and product leaders to investigate customer journeys and service ecosystems. Translate research into opportunity frameworks, future-state concepts, and hypotheses that guide experimentation and investment decisions.

• Synthesize evidence and inspire action: Triangulate qualitative and quantitative research, behavioral data, customer feedback, and external signals to identify meaningful patterns and opportunities. Translate complex findings into compelling narratives and conceptual frameworks that establish shared understanding and drive decisions.

• Influence senior leaders and strategic decisions: Serve as a trusted thought partner to senior Product, Design, and Business leaders. Connect customer insights with business priorities, challenge assumptions, and ensure research informs strategy, experimentation, and experience improvement.

• Lead and elevate research teams: Establish cohesive learning agendas, guide methodological decisions, and coordinate research across multidisciplinary engagements. Coach researchers through complex challenges while maintaining exceptional craft standards and a collaborative, intellectually rigorous environment.

• Advance research methods and capabilities: Develop rigorous approaches to exploring and evaluating emerging experiences, technologies, and service innovations. Strengthen research practice through reusable frameworks, critical review, and responsible experimentation with AI-enabled tools and methods.

• 7+ years of UX research or applied research experience, with a strong track record leading complex generative and exploratory research programs.

• Demonstrated mastery of qualitative research, including interviewing, contextual inquiry, research design, and interpretive synthesis, with the ability to uncover latent needs and develop strategic insights and conceptual frameworks.

• Proven experience partnering with service design, experience strategy, or innovation teams to shape future-state experiences, journey transformation, and strategic opportunities.

• Experience incorporating competitive intelligence, market trends, strategic foresight, or emerging technologies into research to anticipate customer needs and inform experience strategy.

• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, challenge assumptions, and influence director- and VP-level stakeholders through compelling evidence, strategic judgment, and storytelling.

• Experience leading research across multiple researchers or complex workstreams, including setting learning agendas, guiding methodological choices, coaching others, and elevating research quality.

• Strong quantitative literacy and ability to synthesize evidence across qualitative research, surveys, behavioral analytics, customer feedback, and secondary sources.

• Familiarity with foresight methods such as horizon scanning, scenario exploration, or signals analysis, and their application to emerging customer and experience opportunities.