Principal Research Operations, Participant Strategy

Job Description:

Principal Research Operations, Participant Strategy

The Role

Are you passionate about shaping the future of UX research participant engagement? Do you believe the next generation of research will combine the strengths of human participants with advances in AI, agents, and synthetic users? Join our UX Research Operations team and help define how participant recruitment evolves in a rapidly changing technology landscape.

In this Principal-level individual contributor role, you will lead the strategy and execution of participant recruitment across both B2C and B2B research. You will serve as a subject matter expert on participant sourcing, panel management, and recruiting best practices while also helping establish our organization's approach to AI-enabled research methodologies.

Working closely with researchers, product teams, legal and compliance partners, and external vendors, you will develop scalable participant strategies, build and optimize research panels, and evaluate emerging capabilities such as AI agents and synthetic users. You will help determine when human participants are essential, when synthetic participants can accelerate learning, and how to responsibly integrate both into a modern research ecosystem.

This is a highly strategic role for someone who combines deep recruiting expertise with hands-on experience leveraging AI to solve complex operational and research challenges.

The Expertise and Skills You Bring

You are a participant recruitment and panel management expert with a decade or more of experience building scalable recruiting capabilities; and a practitioner of emerging AI methodologies who has personally built agents, experimented with synthetic users, and can help determine how research organizations should evolve in an AI-driven future, especially in a highly regulated industry.

You are a strategic thinker who thrives in ambiguity, influences through expertise rather than authority, and enjoys helping organizations prepare for the future.

Preferred Experience and Skills Include:

• 8-10 plus years of experience in participant recruitment, research operations, UX research, market research, or a related field
• Deep expertise recruiting both B2C and B2B participants, including enterprise decision-makers and specialized audiences
• Experience building, managing, and scaling participant panels, research communities, or participant databases
• Proven success developing recruiting strategies that support qualitative and quantitative research at scale
• Experience managing recruiting vendors, participant providers, and sourcing partnerships
• Hands-on experience building, configuring, or deploying AI agents to automate workflows or improve operational efficiency
• Experience creating, evaluating, or utilizing synthetic users, synthetic personas, or AI-generated participant models
• Strong understanding of the opportunities and limitations of synthetic research methodologies
• Experience developing frameworks for determining when human participants, synthetic participants, or hybrid approaches are most appropriate
• Familiarity with research and recruiting platforms such as User Interviews, UserTesting, dscout, Respondent, Qualtrics, and similar tools
• Strong communication, influence, and stakeholder management skills
• Experience working in highly regulated industries preferred

Note: Fidelity is not providing immigration sponsorship for this position.

The Team

We are a UX Research Operations team dedicated to enabling world-class research in a highly regulated industry. Our mission is to empower researchers with the participants, tools, processes, and support needed to generate meaningful insights and informed product decisions.

As AI continues to transform the research landscape, we are investing in the future of participant strategy. This role will help define how traditional participant recruitment, panel management, AI agents, and synthetic users work together to support high-quality research. You will partner closely with UX Research, Product, Technology, Legal, and Compliance teams to build innovative, responsible, and scalable approaches to participant engagement.

At Fidelity, we value curiosity, innovation, experimentation, and user-centered thinking. We are committed to exploring emerging technologies while maintaining the rigor, trust, and quality that underpin exceptional research.

Fidelity’s Onsite Working Model
Fidelity is transitioning to a full-time onsite working model through a phased rollout across regions and roles. Currently, some roles and locations require 100% onsite presence, while others require less. Onsite expectations are likely to evolve as the rollout continues. This transition does not apply to fully remote roles.

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Please be advised that Fidelity’s business is governed by the provisions of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, the Investment Company Act of 1940, ERISA, numerous state laws governing securities, investment and retirement-related financial activities and the rules and regulations of numerous self-regulatory organizations, including FINRA, among others. Those laws and regulations may restrict Fidelity from hiring and/or associating with individuals with certain Criminal Histories.