UX Researcher (Mixed Methods)

About the company

Tailscale provides an identity-first, zero-trust networking service that uses WireGuard to create peer-to-peer encrypted meshes, integrating with identity providers to simplify NAT traversal and access control.

About this role

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>About Tailscale&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>Tailscale is making safe connection effortless by delivering software that makes it easy to securely interconnect people and their devices, no matter where they are. From hobbyists to multinational corporations, teams of every size use Tailscale each day to protect their networks, share access to internal tools, and more. We're building a future for the Internet that's easy, sensible, and safe, like it used to be. Founded in 2019 and fully distributed, we're backed by Accel, CRV, Insight, Heavybit, and Uncork Capital.</p></div><h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">About the Role</span></h3> <p>This role is a hybrid of UX research and research operations: you'll conduct research, primarily usability and quality-validation testing, and you'll maintain the social and technical systems that make research at Tailscale repeatable and scalable.</p> <p>You'll report to the design manager and work closely with the current UX researcher, who will remain the team's strategic research lead. Day to day, you'll also work with product designers, product managers, and engineers across the organization. Initially, you will be focused on handling a backlog of studies, with a heavy focus on one large ongoing project. Over time, you will grow towards owning the research direction for one or more product areas with increasing autonomy.</p> <p>You'll have significant autonomy on what to prioritize, with support and partnership from the staff researcher and design leadership. Initially your work will be more reactive, and dependent on teams that are currently shifting their planning and delivery rhythms, and reorganizing and re-scoping work. You will have more autonomy with operations work, which runs on a longer rhythm and has several initiatives where you can drive impact on your own. Both require flexibility as the organization evolves.</p> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Key Responsibilities</span></h3> <h4><strong>Research</strong></h4> <p><strong>Run and scale usability research.</strong> Your core research responsibility is usability and quality-validation testing. You will evaluate shipped features, validate design assumptions, and expand the team's testing capacity.</p> <ul> <li>Own the full study lifecycle, from recruiting and scoping through analysis, communicating results, and identifying and collaborating on opportunities.</li> <li>Over time, grow from testing what others identify toward owning the research direction for one or more product areas.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Stakeholder enablement.</strong> Product teams are increasingly expected to understand what their users are experiencing and what problems need attention. You'll support this transition.</p> <ul> <li>Coach designers and PMs through study design, reviewing whether their approach will produce a clear signal, and helping them interpret results and decide on next steps.</li> <li>Build reusable enablement assets, such as templates, reference guides, research skills and workflows, so that your support scales.</li> </ul> <h4>Research operations</h4> <p><strong>Maintain research infrastructure.</strong> As more people run studies and work with research data, the underlying systems need to hold up.&nbsp;</p> <ul> <li>Maintain and improve the research library: standardizing how studies are documented, keeping tags and project organization healthy, ensuring past research is findable and useful.</li> <li>Manage and maintain the research tool stack, which includes the tools we use, templates and guides, and other resources that enable non-stakeholders to engage with or do some limited research themselves.</li> <li>Work with staff and other researchers to review continuous feedback and ensure issues and friction points get tracked by the relevant EPD pods.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Manage logistics.</strong> Running research at a small team means doing the logistical work yourself. In collaboration with the staff researcher, you will:</p> <ul> <li>Manage the participant panel — maintaining list quality, handling invitations, cleaning up between projects. Process study compensation, file receipts, and track budget utilization for studies you run.</li> <li>Handle vendor renewals and procurement coordination, working with legal, finance, and the senior researcher to keep contracts current and paperwork moving.</li> </ul> <h3><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What We Are Looking For</span></h3> <ul> <li>5+ years of experience in UX research or a related applied research field</li> <li>Strong usability testing skills across both qualitative and experimental approaches</li> <li>Proficiency with survey design and the ability to learn and deploy higher-precision quantitative methods as needed</li> <li>Solid grounding in structured and semi-structured qualitative interviewing</li> <li>Mixed-methods fluency — can move between qualitative and quantitative approaches and knows when each is appropriate</li> <li>Clear, effective communicator who can tailor research findings for different audiences and advocate for insights in cross-functional settings</li> <li>Experience independently managing research logistics — recruiting, scheduling, compensation, and study operations</li> <li>Experience working in developer tooling, enterprise, security, or networking</li> </ul> <h3>You Might Be a Good Fit If</h3> <ul> <li>You can synthesize user feedback into underlying problems, identify which ones matter, and articulate why.</li> <li>You can move from what you've learned to a clear recommendation, and you're comfortable putting forward a point of view rather than only presenting findings.</li> <li>You see the connections between research operations and research practice, and you enjoy building the infrastructure that makes research more effective.</li> <li>You think about what research the organization needs, not just what's next on the study plan.</li> <li>You can ramp up quickly to a technical domai