Principal Researcher / Research Lead (Player–Coach)

Multiplier: Global Human Platform

Location: Flexible / Global (Multiplier operates in 150+ countries)

Team: Product Design, Content Design and Research.

Reporting to: Snr Director of Design

About Multiplier

Multiplier is building the world's leading Global Human Platform, enabling companies to hire, onboard, manage, and pay talent across 150+ countries.

From global payroll and compliance to benefits and financial workflows, our platform simplifies complex international employment infrastructure so businesses can scale without borders.

As we embed dedicated domain expertise across five tribes (Core Payroll, Experience, FinX, Foundations, Benefits), research becomes a defining lever for how we understand our customers and decide where to invest. The Principal Researcher / Research Manager defines how research scales: anchored in one pillar, and amplified across Engineering, Product, Design (EPD) through the team they build.

This is where research moves from informing decisions to setting direction.

Role purpose

As a Principal Researcher / Research Manager, you operate in three modes:

1. Stand up the research operating model for Multiplier. You co-create (with Snr Director) how research runs as a function. The tooling and procurement, the operating model itself, research compliance, and the model for sourcing participants. You set the strategy and standards the discipline operates by.

2. Set and execute research strategy at the pillar level. You personally own the research agenda for one pillar, lead the highest-stakes studies, and partner directly with that pillar's product, design, and engineering leaders.

3. Support research across EPD through your team. You build and grow a team of researchers embedded across the other pillars, acting as their coach, soundboard, and collaborator, and through them, raise the research bar across the whole of EPD.

You are accountable for the quality and ambition of research in your own pillar, for the quality and ambition of research everywhere else through the team you grow, and have skin the game for creating the operating model that lets research run reliably across the company.

This role bridges deep research craft and discipline leadership.

What you'll do

Mode 1: Stand up the research operating model

You design how research works as a function, the model and standards, not the daily operations. You decide how the discipline is set up to run, then hand execution to the team and partners.

1.1 Design the operating model, tooling & compliance

• Define how research operates end-to-end across EPD. Covering intake, decision rights, rituals, and how work flows between pillars.

• Set tooling and procurement strategy: the platforms, panels, and vendors the discipline standardizes on.

• Establish research compliance standards, ethics, consent, data handling, and the guardrails for regulated and sensitive domains.

1.2 Define the participant-sourcing model

• Stand up the model for how participants are sourced and recruited, panels, partners, reusable pipelines, so teams aren't rebuilding recruitment study by study.

• Set the standards and guardrails; operational recruitment runs through the team and vendors, not through you.

Mode 2: Set and execute research strategy at the pillar level

You are the research lead for one pillar. You own its agenda end-to-end, and you do the hardest work yourself.

2.1 Support the research strategy for your pillar

• Define a research strategy aligned to the pillar's 1–2 year product ambition.

• Identify the highest-risk assumptions and sequence research investment accordingly.

• Decide when to invest in foundational work vs. tactical studies.

• Influence pillar roadmap decisions through structured insight framing, not just readouts.

• Connect findings across squads within the pillar to surface patterns no single team would see.

2.2 Lead the hardest studies yourself

• Personally lead the most strategic, ambiguous, or high-stakes research in your pillar.

• Choose methods deliberately and defend the trade-offs.

• Synthesize across studies to produce frameworks the wider org references and reuses.

• Partner-of-record to your pillar's design, product, and engineering leadership on the questions that shape direction, not just features.

You stay close enough to the craft to keep raising the ceiling.

Mode 3: Support research across EPD through your team

You build and grow a team of researchers embedded in the other pillars. You don't run their studies. You make them better at running their own, and you make sure the discipline scales.

3.1 Coach, soundboard, and collaborate

• Manage a small but growing team of researchers embedded across other pillars, with scope to scale as the discipline matures.

• Coach researchers on problem framing, method choice, and synthesis, resist the pull to redo their work.

• Act as a soundboard on hard methodological calls: when to push back on a brief, when a study won't answer what the team actually needs, when to escalate.

• Collaborate on the hardest moments of their projects (the framing at the start, the synthesis at the end) without taking the work over.

• Run growth conversations that produce visible level-over-level progression.

3.2 Own team health, hiring, and partnership quality

• Own hiring, performance, and staffing for researchers across EPD.

• Maintain partnership health with design, product, engineering, and data counterparts in every pillar your team touches.

• Make sure research is seen as a strength, not a bottleneck, in the pillars you support.

3.3 Define the craft bar for the discipline

• Define what "good research" means at Multiplier.

• Evolve research infrastructure: participant panels, incentives, repositories, atomic insights, longitudinal programs.

• Standardize quality practices across the team.

You build durable research capability across EPD, not just deliverables in your own pillar.

What success looks like

You are successful in this role if you:

• Define a clear, compelling research direction for your pillar, and ship it.

• Influence roadmap and strategy decisions in your pillar beyond the immediate squad.

• Grow a team of researchers who ship consistent, high-quality work across the rest of EPD.

• Are referenced as the soundboard researchers in other pillars go to when the work is hard.

• Raise the craft bar visibly, across your own work and across the team's.

• Reduce fragmentation in how the org understands its customers.

• Develop researchers into stronger strategic thinkers.

• Leave the discipline more rigorous, more ambitious, and more scalable than you found it.

Scope & ownership

• Own research strategy and execution for one pillar over a 1–2 year horizon.

• Directly manage and develop a small but growing team of researchers embedded across other pillars (player–coach model).

• Lead the highest-stakes studies in your own pillar personally.

• Coach, soundboard, and collaborate on research across EPD through your team.

• Define craft standards, critique norms, and hiring loops for the discipline.

• Contribute to discipline-wide org design and leveling.

• Own the research operating model for Multiplier: tooling and procurement strategy, compliance standards, and the participant-sourcing model (design and standards, not day-to-day operations).

Your influence extends beyond your pillar to how the whole of EPD understands its customers.

What we value

• Strategic clarity over incremental noise.

• Reframing the question over answering the one asked.

• Insight-backed ambition.

• Direct, respectful challenge.

• Quality as a non-negotiable.

We believe research becomes a multiplier when it sets direction, not just validates decisions.

Who you are

• 8–12+ years of UX research experience, including time spent leading research in complex product environments.

• Proven ability to define multi-quarter research strategy and influence senior product decisions.

• Deep craft across generative, evaluative, and mixed-methods research; comfortable defending method trade-offs.

• Experienced managing and growing a team of researchers: hiring, performance, growth.

• Strong systems thinker who connects insight across surfaces and squads.

• Confident influencing senior product, design, and engineering leaders.

• Comfortable leading the hardest studies yourself while coaching others through theirs.

• Motivated to build durable research capability inside a scaling organization.

• Experience designing how a research function runs at scale: tooling and vendor decisions, compliance, and participant-sourcing models.

Multiplier values in action

At Multiplier, we believe:

• Human experiences matter, especially in high-trust payroll and compliance workflows.

• Clarity beats cleverness, particularly at scale.

• People grow people, strong leaders elevate the system around them.

This role embodies all three: sharpening understanding in your pillar, raising the craft bar across EPD, and building the team that sustains it.

Why this role matters now

Multiplier is entering a stage where customer understanding determines our long-term differentiation. The questions ahead (how global employment evolves, how AI reshapes workflows, how trust is built across regulated domains) won't be answered with usability tests alone.

As Principal Researcher / Research Manager, you won't just run studies in one pillar. You will define what research looks like across EPD as the discipline scales.

If you want to move from owning studies to defining how a company learns, this is the seat.