Senior User Researcher
About the role
A Place for Mom is building the future of aging care, and we are looking for a Senior User Researcher to help us understand the people, journeys, and decisions behind that work. This role will strengthen the learning layer across Consumer and Provider experiences, helping product and design teams make better decisions with stronger evidence.
Responsibilities
- Lead research across Consumer and Provider experiences
- Independently own generative and evaluative research across Consumer and Provider experiences, helping teams understand APFM's two core customers: families navigating care decisions and providers growing their businesses while delivering care.
- Shape and maintain a practical research plan tied to product strategy, design priorities, marketplace questions, and leadership decisions.
- Plan and run interviews, usability studies, concept tests, journey research, surveys, diary or longitudinal studies when appropriate, and lightweight mixed-method studies.
- Help teams understand families navigating senior care decisions and providers managing lead quality, engagement, and conversion.
- Turn insight into product and design direction
- Synthesize findings into crisp, decision-oriented artifacts that influence roadmap, product and user experience direction, service design, and product strategy, connecting research to the broader care placement journey where family needs, provider needs, advisor workflows, AI capabilities, and business outcomes intersect.
- Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and customer-facing teams to connect qualitative insight with behavioral, funnel, marketplace, and business data.
- Identify cross-squad patterns, unmet needs, trust gaps, high-risk assumptions, and experience risks before they become delivery problems.
- Facilitate conversations that help teams align on what we know, what we need to learn, and what decisions should change.
- Contribute to repeatable research practices so teams can learn faster without lowering the quality bar.
- Use and improve lightweight rituals, templates, participant pipelines, and insight repositories that make Consumer and Provider insight easier to reuse.
- Partner with designers and product managers on practical research planning, method selection, and evidence-backed decisions.
- Model strong research craft and help teams choose the right level of rigor for the question, from rapid directional learning to deeper strategic research.
- Increase research leverage with AI
- Experiment with AI-assisted workflows to accelerate research planning, desk research, transcript review, synthesis, pattern detection, and insight sharing.
- Use AI responsibly: protect participant privacy, check for hallucinations or overconfident summaries, and keep human interpretation at the center of research judgment.
- Share what you are learning with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and research partners so the team gets better together.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of user research, UX research, product research, design research, or mixed-methods research experience.
- Strong command of qualitative research methods, including interviewing, usability testing, synthesis, and insight storytelling.
- Experience influencing product strategy and design direction through research.
- Ability to operate in ambiguity and prioritize research efforts against business, product, customer, and marketplace needs.
- Experience pairing qualitative research with analytics, experimentation, surveys, funnel data, or operational data.
- Demonstrated curiosity and hands-on experimentation with AI tools in the research or product development process.
- Ability to explain not just what you learned, but how your methods, evidence, constraints, and judgment shaped product decisions.
- Strong facilitation and communication skills with designers, product managers, engineers, analysts, marketers, operators, sales partners, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience in marketplaces, healthcare, senior care, consumer decision journeys, B2B workflows, provider experiences, or high-trust service experiences is a plus.
- Bonus: examples of research artifacts, passion projects, prototypes, side projects, or AI-assisted experiments that show how you think, learn, and make evidence useful.
What You Will Do
Lead research across Consumer and Provider experiences
Independently own generative and evaluative research across Consumer and Provider experiences, helping teams understand APFM's two core customers: families navigating care decisions and providers growing their businesses while delivering care.
Shape and maintain a practical research plan tied to product strategy, design priorities, marketplace questions, and leadership decisions.
Plan and run interviews, usability studies, concept tests, journey research, surveys, diary or longitudinal studies when appropriate, and lightweight mixed-method studies.
Help teams understand families navigating senior care decisions and providers managing lead quality, engagement, and conversion.
Turn insight into product and design direction
Synthesize findings into crisp, decision-oriented artifacts that influence roadmap, product and user experience direction, service design, and product strategy, connecting research to the broader care placement journey where family needs, provider needs, advisor workflows, AI capabilities, and business outcomes intersect.
Partner with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and customer-facing teams to connect qualitative insight with behavioral, funnel, marketplace, and business data.
Identify cross-squad patterns, unmet needs, trust gaps, high-risk assumptions, and experience risks before they become delivery problems.
Facilitate conversations that help teams align on what we know, what we need to learn, and what decisions should change.
Contribute to repeatable research practices so teams can learn faster without lowering the quality bar.
Use and improve lightweight rituals, templates, participant pipelines, and insight repositories that make Consumer and Provider insight easier to reuse.
Partner with designers and product managers on practical research planning, method selection, and evidence-backed decisions.
Model strong research craft and help teams choose the right level of rigor for the question, from rapid directional learning to deeper strategic research.
Increase research leverage with AI
Experiment with AI-assisted workflows to accelerate research planning, desk research, transcript review, synthesis, pattern detection, and insight sharing.
Use AI responsibly: protect participant privacy, check for hallucinations or overconfident summaries, and keep human interpretation at the center of research judgment.
Share what you are learning with Product, Design, Analytics, Engineering, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and research partners so the team gets better together.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of user research, UX research, product research, design research, or mixed-methods research experience.
- Strong command of qualitative research methods, including interviewing, usability testing, synthesis, and insight storytelling.
- Experience influencing product strategy and design direction through research.
- Ability to operate in ambiguity and prioritize research efforts against business, product, customer, and marketplace needs.
- Experience pairing qualitative research with analytics, experimentation, surveys, funnel data, or operational data.
- Demonstrated curiosity and hands-on experimentation with AI tools in the research or product development process.
- Ability to explain not just what you learned, but how your methods, evidence, constraints, and judgment shaped product decisions.
- Strong facilitation and communication skills with designers, product managers, engineers, analysts, marketers, operators, sales partners, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience in marketplaces, healthcare, senior care, consumer decision journeys, B2B workflows, provider experiences, or high-trust service experiences is a plus.
- Bonus: examples of research artifacts, passion projects, prototypes, side projects, or AI-assisted experiments that show how you think, learn, and make evidence useful.
Compensation
Base Salary: $135,000 to $160,000
Bonus: 10% of annual earnings
Benefits: 401(k) plus match
Dental insurance
Health insurance
Vision Insurance
Paid Time Off
About A Place for Mom
A Place for Mom is the leading platform guiding families through every stage of the aging journey. Together, we simplify the senior care search with free, personalized support — connecting caregivers and their loved ones to vetted providers from our network of 15,000+ senior living communities and home care agencies. Since 2000, our teams have helped millions of families find care that fits their needs. Behind every referral and resource is a shared goal: to help families focus on what matters most — their love for each other. We’re proud to be a mission-driven company where every role contributes to improving lives. Caring isn’t just a core value — it’s who we are. Whether you’re supporting families directly or driving innovation behind the scenes, your work at A Place for Mom makes a real difference. Our Employees Live The Company Values Every Day
Additional Information
A Place for Mom has recently become aware of the fraudulent use of our name on job postings and via recruiting emails that are illegitimate and not in any way associated with us. APFM will never ask you to provide sensitive personal information as part of the recruiting process, such as your social security number; send you any unsolicited job offers or employment contracts; require any fees, payments, or access to financial accounts; and/or extend an offer without conducting an interview. If you suspect you are being scammed or have been scammed online, you may report the crime to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and obtain more information regarding online scams at the Federal Trade Commission. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines. A Place for Mom uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit www.dhs.gov/E-Verify.