Senior Qualitative Researcher - Growth & Marketing

Why we’re searching for a Senior Qualitative Researcher. 
At Wealthfront, we’re on a mission to build a financial system that favors people, not institutions. We will only succeed in this mission if we deeply understand the values, motivations and goals of current and future clients, enabling us to offer products and services that make their best possible futures more attainable. That’s why we’re looking for an exceptional qualitative researcher—someone committed to understanding the variety of human experiences, social relations and structures, and cultural influences and practices. 
In the last two years, we’ve experienced exceptional growth as the business has reached key milestones. We’ve kept our company lean, focused, and profitable. As Growth and Marketing propel us to new heights, we’re building our teams to scale. We created this new research role to provide consistent, detailed insights into the rich and vivid textures of the lives of current and future clients, and the idiosyncrasies of financial decision making. We’re looking for a researcher who can inspire new Growth and Marketing initiatives through empirical qualitative evidence and creative flair, with the aim of making Wealthfront iconic within our industry and beloved by our target audience. 
What do we offer you?
Research is at the heart of all Wealthfront’s client-facing initiatives—our product process centers continuous learning enabled by research; it is the springboard from which every marketing campaign is launched. Researchers have the responsibility of being leaders within their areas (Growth and Marketing in this case), co-owners of the team’s strategy, roadmap and execution. We’re looking for a Senior User Researcher who craves this responsibility, who wants to use their research tool kit to achieve new levels of impact as an individual contributor and as part of the Growth and Marketing teams.
As a Senior User Researcher embedded within the Growth and Marketing teams, you’ll take on client-facing projects intended to make a lasting impact on the growth trajectory of our business. You’ll lead end-to-end projects from study design to insight delivery, in collaboration with partners from product management, design, marketing, data science and engineering. 
To support you, we’ll surround you with peers and mentors. You’ll collaborate with and report to the Head of Research to define your roadmap and tailor your study design. You’ll work directly with a skilled quantitative researcher to inform and augment your qualitative work. And, best of all, you’ll join a talented team of Wealthfront researchers working across all our products and services, ensuring you’ll have easy access to their accumulated knowledge and experience. Finally, you’ll be a member of both the Product and Marketing organizations, offering you a perspective on everything we create and insight into the most important decisions affecting business growth. 

If you join us, you will:

• Lead high-impact research projects that inspire growth and marketing initiatives to increase awareness of Wealthfront and spur word-of-mouth interest within our target audience. 
• Uncover ideal client experiences that signal a way forward as we evolve our brand positioning and expand our product and service offerings.
• Dive deep into referral networks to uncover what motivates or inhibits clients from referring their friends or family members to Wealthfront. 
• Understand the motivations and circumstances that first prompt someone to consider Wealthfront; the criteria they use to compare us to alternatives; why they choose us (or not) and what barriers they faced in doing so. 
• Work with lifecycle marketing to deepen our relationship with existing clients.
• Partner with cross-functional teammates from design, product, marketing, data science, and engineering to identify, plan, and execute research.
• Lead a mix of research types, including exploratory projects to inspire new concepts, as well as evaluative projects that refine design concepts. 
• Learn about financial technology, investing, research, design, and so much more!

Relevant experience and mindset we’d like to see:

• You have a graduate degree in the social sciences (Anthropology, Sociology, etc.) with a qualitative research orientation, or an MBA with qualitative research experience. 
• 2+ years of industry experience in qualitative research roles.
• You are experienced in partnering with skilled quantitative researchers, and adept at combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to persuade.  
• You absolutely love working closely with design, marketing and product leads to design creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems.  
• You are curious, a quick learner, and self-directed in pursuit of high quality outcomes.
• You’re able to communicate effectively and in a compelling