Principal Researcher / Research Lead (Player–Coach)

Multiplier: Global Human Platform

Location: Flexible / Global (Multiplier operates in 150+ countries)

Team: Product Design, Content Design and Research.

Reporting to: Snr Director of Design

About Multiplier

Multiplier is building the world's leading Global Human Platform, enabling companies to hire, onboard, manage, and pay talent across 150+ countries.

From global payroll and compliance to benefits and financial workflows, our platform simplifies complex international employment infrastructure so businesses can scale without borders.

As we embed dedicated domain expertise across five tribes (Core Payroll, Experience, FinX, Foundations, Benefits), research becomes a defining lever for how we understand our customers and decide where to invest. The Principal Researcher / Research Manager defines how research scales: anchored in one pillar, and amplified across Engineering, Product, Design (EPD) through the team they build.

This is where research moves from informing decisions to setting direction.

Role purpose

As a Principal Researcher / Research Manager, you operate in three modes:

1. Stand up the research operating model for Multiplier. You co-create (with Snr Director) how research runs as a function. The tooling and procurement, the operating model itself, research compliance, and the model for sourcing participants. You set the strategy and standards the discipline operates by.

2. Set and execute research strategy at the pillar level. You personally own the research agenda for one pillar, lead the highest-stakes studies, and partner directly with that pillar's product, design, and engineering leaders.

3. Support research across EPD through your team. You build and grow a team of researchers embedded across the other pillars, acting as their coach, soundboard, and collaborator, and through them, raise the research bar across the whole of EPD.

You are accountable for the quality and ambition of research in your own pillar, for the quality and ambition of research everywhere else through the team you grow, and have skin the game for creating the operating model that lets research run reliably across the company.

This role bridges deep research craft and discipline leadership.

What you'll do

Mode 1: Stand up the research operating model

You design how research works as a function, the model and standards, not the daily operations. You decide how the discipline is set up to run, then hand execution to the team and partners.

1.1 Design the operating model, tooling & compliance

• Define how research operates end-to-end across EPD. Covering intake, decision rights, rituals, and how work flows between pillars.

• Set tooling and procurement strategy: the platforms, panels, and vendors the discipline standardizes on.

• Establish research compliance standards, ethics, consent, data handling, and the guardrails for regulated and sensitive domains.

1.2 Define the participant-sourcing model

• Stand up the model for how participants are sourced and recruited, panels, partners, reusable pipelines, so teams aren't rebuilding recruitment study by study.

• Set the standards and guardrails; operational recruitment runs through the team and vendors, not through you.

Mode 2: Set and execute research strategy at the pillar level

You are the research lead for one pillar. You own its agenda end-to-end, and you do the hardest work yourself.

2.1 Support the research strategy for your pillar

• Define a research strategy aligned to the pillar's 1–2 year product ambition.

• Identify the highest-risk assumptions and sequence research investment accordingly.

• Decide when to invest in foundational work vs. tactical studies.

• Influence pillar roadmap decisions through structured insight framing, not just readouts.

• Connect findings across squads within the pillar to surface patterns no single team would see.

2.2 Lead the hardest studies yourself

• Personally lead the most strategic, ambiguous, or high-stakes research in your pillar.

• Choose methods deliberately and defend the trade-offs.

• Synthesize across studies to produce frameworks the wider org references and reuses.

• Partner-of-record to your pillar's design, product, and engineering leadership on the questions that shape direction, not just features.

You stay close enough to the craft to keep raising the ceiling