Manager, UX Research

About the opportunity

Dayforce is looking for a highly motivated and strategic Sr. User Research Manager to shape the future of human-AI workforce experiences and lead a team of researchers who deliver strategic insight, influence product direction, and help create exceptional experiences for customers and users

Design at Dayforce is evolving beyond traditional enterprise software toward intelligent, human-centered experiences that help organizations and their people navigate increasingly complex work. As Dayforce transforms into an AI-powered and agentic human capital management (HCM) platform, we are reimagining how technology can augment work and aid human decision-making, while preserving human control and judgment where it matters, enabling operational efficiency, and delivering trust and compliance that are essential in HCM. Research plays a critical role in this transformation, helping the organization understand where AI creates meaningful value, where human oversight remains necessary, and how trust, transparency, and accountability can be designed into experiences that people and organizations can confidently adopt. Crucial to this evolution will be a Sr. Manager, UXR, leading a team of researchers who ensure customer and user needs remain at the center of product decisions while advancing the quality, responsibility, and impact of our AI-enabled experiences. 

Given the scale and potential for impact, this role is for people with existing management experience. We’re looking for a leader with a strong diplomatic bent, using their relationship skills to bring cross-functional collaborators into the work, and uphold the values and quality standards in a stakeholder-rich environment. 

What you’ll get to do

• People management for a team of 5-7 researchers, including 1:1s, regular coaching and feedback on project work, professional development, performance reviews, etc.
• Bring a B2B strategic mindset that helps researchers connect their work to business value to drive impact
• Lead the research direction of your team, establishing a vision for how research informs product strategy, AI innovation, and experience quality across Dayforce.
• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering, and AI teams to shape the future of intelligent and agentic experiences, identifying opportunities where automation, assistance, and human expertise can work together to create customer value.
• Keep researchers (and cross-functional peers) focused on the research work that will deliver strategic impact and improve the experience of our users
• Help develop early career researchers through modeling more advanced research skills like scoping, strategy, mixed method approaches and triangulation across diverse data sets.
• Seamlessly shift between strategy and the details of delivery, connecting efforts at all levels of abstraction
• Uphold quality standards in the face of myriad pressures such as timelines, feedback, and workloads. Say, “No,” in a way that invites further discussion of how we can all get to “Yes.”
• Build relationships and partner with leaders across Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Strategy to prioritize research that informs roadmap decisions, drives strategic value, and elevates product and experience quality.
• Ensure that your team maintains focus on their work, avoiding disruption and distraction
• Guide the evolution of research operations to enable an effective, scalable, and efficient research practice that supports researchers, designers, and cross-functional teams.
• Contribute to the evolution of our research practice as AI becomes embedded in both our products and ways of working. Help define how researchers leverage AI responsibly throughout the product development lifecycle while maintaining rigorous research standards, preserving critical human judgment, and ensuring insights continue to reflect the needs, expectations, and trust of our customers and users.
• Actively recruit and hire researchers on other design professionals when the need arises

• Experience managing and developing UX researchers, with a demonstrated commitment to mentorship, coaching, and growing research capability across teams
• Success at bringing a range of people into the research and design process, including cross-functional partners (product managers, designers, developers, marketers)
• Experience leading projects/teams that ship complicated product (multiple user types, feature complexity) that has made positive impact on its users and clear business impact
• Experience conducting research in domains where accuracy, trust, compliance, risk, or governance considerations materially influence product design and adoption.
• Prior experience articulating the connections between user/customer value and our business ambitions, and developing measurement strategies in a given project context
• Experience researching, designing, or evaluating AI-powered, conversational, agentic, or decision-support experiences, including an understanding of user trust, transparency, governance, and adoption considerations.
• Strong written and oral communication and presentation skills, clearly articulating research findings and their implications and new opportunities
• Orderly and organized, maintaining multiple conversation threads across product teams
• Comfortable with scoping research for decision-making and structuring/planning research and design work in cross-functional contexts
• Demonstrated ability to guide teams through periods of technological and organizational change, helping researchers adapt methods and practices to emerging AI-enabled product development environments.