Lead UX Researcher, AI & Digital Experiences

About the role

To get the best candidate experience, please consider applying for a maximum of 3 roles within 12 months to ensure you are not duplicating efforts.

Job Category

User Experience

The Experience

Join Salesforce's Digital User Research team, part of Digital Marketing Technology. We deliver objective, actionable insights that shape customer-facing experiences and internal tools across Salesforce's digital marketing portfolio, including websites and digital destinations, email and messaging, in-person and virtual events, and marketing-focused agentic experiences.

As Lead User Researcher, you will own research across two of the team's most strategic areas: agentic experiences and event technology. You will help teams understand emerging mental models, unmet needs, friction, trust, and where people need transparency, control, guidance, or human support. You will also lead research that improves the digital experiences supporting Salesforce events across in-person, virtual, and on-demand formats.

We are seeking a curious, experienced researcher who knows how to select and combine methods such as interviews, usability testing, surveys, and behavioral data analysis to answer complex questions. You will lead research across multiple products and stakeholder groups, develop strategy across a portfolio of projects, build alignment around the research questions and opportunities that matter most, and communicate insights that influence product strategy and experience decisions.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Shape Research Strategy by proactively identify emerging research needs, surface gaps and opportunities, and provide a clear, evidence-based point of view to inform research priorities across the digital marketing portfolio.
• Independently scope and plan multiple projects end to end, defining the decisions to inform, milestones, dependencies, audiences, methods, risks, and measures of success.
• Translate ambiguous business and product questions into strategic and tactical research plans, reframing the opportunity and adjusting the approach as the evidence and business context evolve.
• Creatively combine qualitative and quantitative methods to overcome constraints and deliver a more complete picture of the data. Methods may include interviews, contextual inquiry, jobs-to-be-done research, concept evaluation, usability testing, task studies, surveys, benchmarking, and experimentation.
• Define credible audiences and recruitment criteria, protect data quality, and ensure findings appropriately represent the people and contexts the product is intended to serve.
• Connect evidence across sources by synthesizing user research, analytics, experimentation, and industry research to identify patterns, communicate confidence and limitations, and deliver a more complete understanding of the user experience.
• Build a deep understanding of customer and employee needs, digital behaviors, marketing goals, and evolving technologies to uncover opportunities across channels, journeys, audiences, and connected digital experiences.
• Advance agentic experience research. Study how people understand, trust, and engage with AI agents, including expectations for autonomy, transparency, control, personalization, human oversight, failure recovery, and escalation.
• Establish customer-centered measures of usefulness, task success, quality, trust, adoption,and agent performance across connected AI-powered experiences.
• Conduct foundational and evaluative research across Salesforce's in-person, virtual, and on-demand event experiences, including onsite observation, intercept interviews, surveys, and usability testing.
• Translate evidence into clear recommendations, strategic guidance, measurement frameworks, and future-state direction that shape digital strategies, experience roadmaps, requirements, and experiments.
• Create compelling narratives and data visualizations, present to audiences ranging from product teams to executives, and lead workshops that turn research findings into aligned decisions and follow-up actions.
• Advance research methods, reusable tools, measurement standards, and responsible uses of AI; mentor others, and champion inclusive and accessible research.

You're Our Person If

• Deep expertise in qualitative research and strong fluency in quantitative methods, with excellent judgment about research questions, method selection, audience recruitment, evidence quality, and maintaining methodological rigor across research of varying scope and pace.
• Ability to plan, design, execute, analyze, and communicate foundational, generative, evaluative, and measurement research at both strategic and tactical levels.
• Comfortable conducting research in fast-paced, live event environments and are willing and able to travel approximately four to five times per year to support onsite research at Salesforce events.
• A record of proactively identifying high-value research opportunities and influencing product strategy, roadmaps, requirements, designs, and measurable business outcomes.
• Strong understanding of digital marketing experiences and the ability to connect research evidence to customer and employee needs, business goals, channel strategies, technical considerations, and potential implications across the broader digital portfolio.
• Working knowledge of basic statistical concepts and behavioral data, with the ability to interpret and integrate survey findings, digital analytics, and experimentation results alongside qualitative evidence while clearly communicating limitations.
• Demonstrated AI fluency and experience building AI-assisted research workflows, with sound judgment about where AI adds value, where human expertise is essential, and how to prevent speed or automation from distorting a finding.
• Strong facilitation, storytelling, and communication skills, with experience tailoring evidence and recommendations for product teams, cross-functional leaders, and executive audiences.
• Experience strengthening a research practice through mentoring, reusable frameworks, enablement and research knowledge systems.
• Ability to deliver high-quality work in a fast-moving environment with constrained timelines and collaborate effectively across globally distributed teams and time zones.
• A commitment to responsible, ethical, and inclusive research, particularly in rapidly evolving AI contexts.

Unleash Your Potential

When you join Salesforce, you'll be limitless in all areas of your life. Our benefits and resources support you to find balance and be your best, and our AI agents accelerate your impact so you can do your best. Together, we'll bring the power of Agentforce to organizations of all sizes and deliver amazing experiences that customers love. Apply today to not only shape the future - but to redefine what's possible - for yourself, for AI, and the world.

Accommodations

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Posting Statement

What does that mean exactly? It means that at Salesforce, we believe in equality for all. And we believe we can lead the path to equality in part by creating a workplace that's inclusive, and free from discrimination. Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal. This policy applies to current and prospective employees, no matter where they are in their Salesforce employment journey.

It also applies to recruiting, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, assessment of job performance, discipline, termination, and everything in between. Recruiting, hiring, and promotion decisions at Salesforce are fair and based on merit. The same goes for compensation, benefits, promotions, transfers, reduction in workforce, recall, training, and education.

In the United States, compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, job level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for incentive compensation, equity, and benefits. Salesforce offers a variety of benefits to help you live well including: time off programs, medical, dental, vision, mental health support, paid parental leave, life and disability insurance, 401(k), and an employee stock purchasing program.

At Salesforce, we believe in equitable compensation practices that reflect the dynamic nature of labor markets across various regions. The typical base salary range for this position is $172,500 - $260,100 annually. In select cities within the San Francisco and New York City metropolitan area, the base salary range for this role is $207,800 - $285,800 annually. The range represents base salary only, and does not include company bonus, incentive for sales roles, equity or benefits, as applicable.