Senior UX Researcher

Position Overview

About AERDF

AERDF (Advanced Education Research & Development Fund) is a national nonprofit organization launched in 2021 that advances scientific discovery & inventions that further learners’ brilliance and transform their PreK-12 futures. AERDF’s ambitious three-to-five-year initiatives (known as programs), funded with budgets up to $25 million, address major teaching and learning challenges and opportunities the public and private sector have historically ignored for Black and Latino learners and learners experiencing poverty in the United States. Since AERDF’s launch, its programs – currently focused on math, formative assessment, and reading – have engaged more than 20,000 students. Learn more about AERDF and our programs at https://aerdf.org.

Role Summary

Assessment For Good (AFG) is currently organized around a set of technical prototypes and tech-free solutions spanning six core areas of learner wellbeing (Emotional Development, Engagement, Belonging, Executive Function, Learning Time, Social Development). Generating insights is at the heart of AFG’s work. AFG is building prototypes to generate insights to change the field of learning science. We are seeking a Senior UX Researcher to help advance this work within the Product Team.

Reporting to the Director of Strategy, you will be pivotal in collecting user insights to inform product & program strategy and design. You’ll be responsible for helping identify key user research questions, creating a plan to answer those questions, drafting interview protocols and usability tests, and interviewing learners, caregivers, and educators to collect data. You’ll also be responsible for maintaining and improving our Airtable to house our insights. Lastly, you’ll support sharing insights internally to drive improvement, create artifacts like personas and user journey maps, and disseminating learnings with the external field.

A few notes about what makes user research at AFG unique:

We take student data privacy seriously at AERDF and hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards. Therefore, all of our user research for product development is governed by IRB and follows strict protocols to maintain student privacy.

Research happens all across AFG and we collaborate closely across teams. This person will be expected to collaborate closely with researchers on the Research and Implementation teams to coordinate research activities and dissemination of insights. There will be some research activities that this person will lead while consulting the Research team and other activities where this person will support the Research team.

We believe in conducting research with the communities we serve instead of on them. Therefore, all of our research activities will need to be done with a lens of emancipatory R&D. This person will work closely with the Director of Strategy and others to ensure that our interview protocols are culturally responsive, allow users to co-create solutions with us, and elevate the strengths of the users.

This role may be a limited-time position that will end at the end of 2026 when AFG's program with AERDF ends. We will re-evaluate extending this position at that time.

AERDF is a fully remote organization, and employees may work anywhere in the United States.

We are deeply committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. People of all backgrounds and identities, particularly those with the lived experience of the students and communities we serve, are encouraged to apply.  Please do not hesitate to apply even if you do not meet all of the qualifications.

Core Responsibilities

What You Will Do:

• Help identify and prioritize key user research questions to explore based on overall program and design needs
• Scope projects that fit within Product’s user research and collaborate closely with the Research teams’ user researchers and analytic partners to advance program goals
• Design and execute end-to-end custom primary research using a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, e.g., surveys, focus groups, user interviews, usability tests
• Facilitate in-person and/or online user research sessions with students, caregivers, and educators
• Lead and execute a strategy to facilitate user research at scale, including identifying and hiring contract facilitation resources
• Ensure that user research strategy and execution are in alignment with AFG’s vision of emancipatory R&D
• Synthesize user research to generate insights to advance programs’ understanding of key hypotheses and inform product strategy
• Develop intricate user personas and map journeys with an asset-based lens that reflects the communities AFG serves based on user research
• Manage and improve AFG’s Airtable of user research sessions to organize and elevate key insights
• Manage project timelines across to achieve quarterly OKRs
• Travel up to 30% for in-person team meetings, retreats, partner visits, research implementation, convenings, and conferences as it is safe to do so. This percentage may fluctuate across the year depending upon our implementation needs.

Qualifications

Skills, Mindsets & Experience:

Professional Qualifications

• At least 5 years’ of relevant experience in user experience, applied research and/or product research and development in K-12 education
• Ideally, experience working with Black and Latinx communities
• Proven ability to work autonomously, meeting deadlines and delivering independently
• Experience executing primary research, including in-depth interviews, and/or focus groups
• Experience managing facilitators of user research
• Experience translating research findings into strategic narratives and actionable insights

Personal Characteristics

• Mission-driven and believe deeply in the transformative power that asset-based paradigms can have in disrupting educational inequity.
• Comfort navigating ambiguity
• Demonstrate clear and consistent communication to collaborate effectively and respectfully across teams
• Entrepreneurial drive to achieve stretch goals in a fast-paced environment.
• Exceptional analytical capabilities and organization skills

Compensation Expectations

We offer a competitive compensation package including base salary and comprehensive benefits.  AERDF is a remote and flexible work environment. Our base compensation levels vary depending on location, experience, and qualifications.

The base salary range for this role is $97,830 - $141,310

• For the states of California and New York, the base salary range is: $105,950 - $141,310
• For the state of Washington, the base salary range is: $$93,725 - $125,005
• For the states of Colorado, Hawaii, and Nevada, the base salary range is: $89,650- $119,570