Senior User Researcher

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.

APFM is organizing around the two customers that define our marketplace: families navigating care decisions and providers delivering care. Evolving toward a more connected experience across the full care placement journey.

This is a senior, user-centered, product-embedded research role. You will work across squads and help APFM connect family decision journeys, provider realities, product data, marketplace signals, and business strategy into a clearer view of where to focus.

This role is for someone who is curious about where research is going, not only where it has been. We do not expect anyone to have ten years of experience with tools that are only beginning to emerge. We do expect you to be actively experimenting with AI tools, learning where they help, where they fail, and how they can create leverage without replacing research rigor, participant privacy, human judgment, or deep user understanding.

Who you are:

You are a high-agency researcher: someone who moves toward ambiguity, takes ownership without waiting for perfect direction, and uses research, data, and AI-native tools to help teams make better decisions faster. You know how to choose the right method, run rigorous studies, synthesize quickly, and make insights actionable for product, design, engineering, marketing, operations, sales, and leadership partners. You are comfortable with both generative and evaluative research, and you know that the best research changes decisions, not just documents findings.

You are AI-forward without being AI-naive. You are curious about tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, NotebookLM, Dovetail AI, Maze AI, synthetic-data workflows, transcript analysis tools, MCP-enabled workflows, or similar tools, and you have probably tried some of them before they were fully ready. You understand that these tools can accelerate desk research, synthesis, pattern detection, research operations, and storytelling, but that they also introduce bias, privacy, quality, and interpretation risks that researchers need to manage carefully.

You combine strong research craft with pragmatic product judgment. You can listen deeply to families, providers, and internal teams, then translate what you learn into product direction, experience strategy, and clear next steps. You are energized by mission-driven work and by the chance to improve experiences that affect families during stressful, emotional, high-stakes decisions.

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.

Strengthen research quality and reuse

• 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.

• Help APFM evaluate AI-enabled product experiences for trust, usefulness, clarity, safety, adoption, and edge cases in moments where families and providers need confidence.

• 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.

Portfolio or work samples:

Please include a portfolio, case studies, or work samples that show your research judgment, craft, synthesis, and decision influence. We are especially interested in work that shows how you move from ambiguity to clarity. Passion projects, research artifacts, AI-assisted experiments, or side projects are welcome if they help us understand how you think, learn, and communicate evidence outside of a standard case study format.

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

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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:

• Mission Over Me: We find purpose in helping caregivers and their senior loved ones while approaching our work with empathy.

• Do Hard Things: We are energized by solving challenging problems and see it as an opportunity to grow.

• Drive Outcomes as a Team: We each own the outcome but can only achieve it as a team.

• Win The Right Way: We see organizational integrity as the foundation for how we operate.

• Embrace Change: We innovate and constantly evolve.

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.