Staff User Experience Researcher

Who We Are

Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling semi-trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, its driver-as-a-service products for trucking and ride-hailing. Aurora is working with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including Toyota, FedEx, Volvo Trucks, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, U.S. Xpress, Werner, Covenant, Schneider, and Ryder. For Aurora’s latest news, visit aurora.tech and @aurora_inno on Twitter.

Aurora hires talented people with diverse backgrounds who are ready to help build a transportation ecosystem that will make our roads safer, get crucial goods where they need to go, and make mobility more efficient and accessible for all. We’re searching for a Staff User Experience Researcher. This person will partner closely with senior leaders, engineers, product managers, and designers to streamline and scale internal processes and tools to help us bring the Aurora Driver to market. You should feel comfortable performing a full range of UX research skills including discovery, evaluation, analysis and synthesis, and communication and presentation. You’ll gain a deep understanding and advocate for the users who are responsible for the development and testing of the Aurora Driver. You’ll help to define tools, services and workflows that enable data-driven decision making. We're excited to welcome you as a team member to deliver the benefits of self-driving to the world. This is a full-time position in our Mountain View, CA, San Francisco, CA or Pittsburgh, PA office.

In this role you will

• Lead a UX research initiative to evaluate the usefulness and usability of essential workflows behind our self-driving technology, empowering teams to identify and enhance areas for optimization.
• Collaborate with diverse cross-functional partners to pinpoint opportunities to optimize our human-in-the-loop tool ecosystem, accelerating the advancement of development and testing.
• Design and conduct qualitative studies, including field observations and interviews, remote and in-person usability studies for existing and future products.
• Design and conduct quantitative studies, such as structuring and analyzing surveys to evaluate the impact of product changes and capture insights at scale.
• Identify and explore new opportunities through creative research methods and co-design sessions to help define product roadmaps, vision, and strategy.
• Collaborate with other researchers, designers, product managers, data scientists, marketing and operations managers, and engineers to ensure research you deliver is coordinated into every aspect of the product and provides a holistic view of our users.
• Synthesize and communicate research findings to advise business decisions through rich storytelling via presentations, reports, workshops and any other novel, creative approaches that you invent.
• Adapt and innovate research methods to meet product needs by delivering high-quality insights in a fast-paced work environment, and by contextualizing for specific use cases across autonomy development products. 
• Build insight across the organization to improve the products we build  and always be a champion for our users.

Essential Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional UX Research experience.
• BA/BS degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Statistics, Psychology, Computer Science, Anthropology, Communications, Information Science, Sociology, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience working on complex interactive systems or data products.
• Ability to work collaboratively with people from all disciplines and levels including senior leadership.
• Ability to communicate complex ideas to the team and stakeholders.
• Previous experience driving research programs that have had a lasting impact on product and design decisions.
• Track record of demonstrating excellent command of research questions within a given domain and of technical tools for the analysis of data within that domain.

Desirable Qualifications

• MS or Ph.D. degree in HCI, Psychology, Statistics, Computer Science
• Familiarity with a programming language commonly used for data manipulation and comp