Senior Product Researcher

Every developer has a tab open on Stack Overflow.  

We are one of the most popular websites in the world - a community-based space focused on increasing productivity, decreasing cycle times, accelerating time to market, and protecting institutional knowledge. 

Innovation is at the heart of everything we do. We embrace collaboration, transparency, and believe in leading with empathy; creating an environment where every Stacker knows they belong. We embrace that the unique contributions and points of view of all Stackers contribute to our success.

We are a Best Company to Work For, in addition to being recognized for Best Company Leadership, Best Company Happiness, Best Company Perks and Benefits, Best Company Work-Life Balance, Best Company Compensation, and Best Company Outlook.

We are a remote-first company with Hiring HUBs based in the US, Canada, UK, and Germany.

At Stack Overflow, our mission is to serve developers by building products that make millions of developers’ lives better every day. As a Senior+ Product Researcher at Stack Overflow, you’ll have a major impact on how we build products by creating insightful, actionable user research to guide our strategy and execution.

Stack Overflow today has over 17 million question and answer pairs, sees 50 million unique visitors a month, and has been visited over 12 billion times in the past decade. You’ll be conducting research for one of the largest, most engaging products on the internet. While we’re proud of how far we’ve come, we need your help to make Stack Overflow an attractive community for the next 10 million developers.

You’ll be joining our User Experience team—a small group of Product Designers and Researchers focused on projects across our products. You’ll work with a wide variety of people here at Stack Overflow; everyone from product managers and designers to community managers and customer support. You’ll help your team understand the unmet needs of our clients and users, and use this insight to help guide the strategy of our products to make sure we are solving real problems.

We’re looking for someone with plenty of experience doing UX research, and who is excited to continue defining and evangelizing user research within our company. You’ll have an immediate impact on existing projects and you’ll quickly expand into longer-term strategic research of your devising. Ideally, we are looking for a mix of qualitative and quantitative research skills. You should also have experience leading research for a range of products, and be able to guide and mentor other members of your team who are doing research.

What you’ll do:

• Partner with product teams on a fast-moving product development process within which you will plan and execute pragmatic, insightful, product-focused research and deliver clear, actionable insights
• Directly guide product strategy, by surfacing unmet user and customer needs and working with your team to develop these into concepts that will grow our products
• Navigate large, ambiguous problem spaces in order to conduct strategic research that will ultimately guide the trajectory of our product(s)
• Assist and mentor product teammates conducting their own tactical research to expand the reach and influence of research at Stack Overflow
• Participate in and grow our research ops practices, by sanitizing PII, managing recruitment lists, building research repositories, and more
• Dedicate time to furthering research as a practice within the company – through teaching, tooling, and introducing processes where needed and appropriate

What we need to see:

• 5+ years of product research experience
• Applied experience with a range of qualitative (e.g., user interviews, usability testing, focus groups, etc.) and quantitative methodologies (e.g., surveys, split testing, etc.)
• Applied experience in thoughtful, thorough research in a strategic setting
• Experience running research in a variety of environments and with a variety of different types of user
• Excellent written and oral communication skills and an ability to explain research outcomes to a wide audience
• High levels of organization and ability to organize work across multiple product teams
• (Desired) Experience with both B2B and B2C products and the ability to navigate their varied constraints
• (Desired) Experience working on community-driven platforms e.g., Reddit, Wikimedia, GitHub, etc
• (Desired) An understanding of Stack Overflow, other Stack Exchange network sites, and Stack Overflow for Teams.

What you might work on

• Conduct research regarding why users choose Stack Overflow, what motivates them to participate, and how might we  incentivize users to participate more
• Understand the biggest pain points in our current moderation systems and compare them to other at-scale implementations

Also note:

• We’re a distributed, remote team and you’ll be part of a work culture that emphasizes online & asynchronous communication with minimal meetings and ceremonies
• We’re generally very flexible on working hours, though we do ask everyone on the team to maintain an overlap with (at least) 10AM - 1PM US Eastern time

Salary banding: $138,000 – $180,000

What you’ll get in return:

• Competitive Base Salary 
• Flexible Time Off
• Generous parental leave (16 weeks at 100% pay), family care leave, and unlimited sick days
• Equity (RSUs) for all employees at all levels
• Industry-leading health benefits that are applicable per country of residence for all our full-time employees
• Company-paid Life Insurance
• Home Internet stipend
• Professional allocation for your growth and development
• One-time allowance to assist with your home office setup
• Company-paid access to Calm, Bravely, LinkedIn Learning, MyAcademy and Overdrive

Diverse teams build better products.

Legally, we need you to know this: 

Stack Overflow is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We value diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging and these pillars are at the heart of how we work together here at Stack. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying. 

For individuals based in California, and other locations where required, we will consider employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

But we want to add this:

We strongly believe that diversity contributes to a broader collective perspective that will consistently lead to a better company and better products. We are working hard to increase the diversity of our team wherever we can and we actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of it.

What you’ll get in return:

• Competitive Base Salary 
• Generous paid vacation
• Generous parental leave (16 weeks at 100% pay), family care leave, and unlimited sick days
• Equity for all employees at all levels
• Industry-leading health benefits that are applicable per country of residence for all our full-time employees
• Company-paid Life Insurance
• Home Internet stipend
• Professional allocation for your growth and development
• One-time allowance to assist with your home office setup
• Company-paid access to Calm, Bravely, LinkedIn Learning, MyAcademy and Overdrive

Stack Overflow is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We value diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging and these pillars are at the heart of how we work together here at Stack. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or any other applicable legally protected characteristics in the location in which the candidate is applying. 

For individuals based in California, and other locations where required, we will consider employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.