Senior Manager, Research & User Intelligence (Individual contributor)

Summary:

Capital One’s Experience Design (XD) organization is focused on co-creating memorable, meaningful customer and associate experiences that build our brand with humanity and drive business advantage. As the Senior Manager of Research & User Intelligence for a product tower, you are responsible for accelerating learning velocity by defining and executing research programs that generate actionable insights to inform the creation of useful and usable solutions.

Role Expectations:

The Card Platforms & Data team is seeking a Senior Manager of Design Research to join our highly collaborativeand multidisciplinary team of designers, product managers, analysts, and technologists. This individual contributor role is expected to provide a human-centered lens to a largely technical problem space by conducting multi-method research studies with both internal associates and customers. 

The ideal candidate has a proactive, collaborative approach to research to complement their deep experience in qualitative and quantitative research, human-centered interactions, and analytical thinking. Experience conducting research in technical spaces or internal platforms is of particular interest for this position, but not required.

Responsibilities:

• Optimize and Scale Cumulative User Intelligence:Plan and conduct connected studies and establish data acquisition mechanisms that contribute to a collective body of user intelligence that fuels product teams’ planning and decision-making, while maintaining a high degree of governance and risk compliance.

• Prioritize and lead rapid testing within the product development lifecycle:Create and evolve research agents and research platforms to accelerate learning velocity: extracting insights from existing intelligence repositories, conducting rapid discovery, concept, content, and usability testing.

• Manage and Maintain Continuous Discovery Programming:Drive collaboration with research ops to enable partner teams to access their users to maximize empathy and understanding.

• Support UX Measurement and Hypothesis-driven Design:Partner with CX, data scientists, analysts, and designers to identify and track domain-specific UX metrics. Assist in developing mechanisms to collect/measure UX metrics, conduct analysis using UX and other metrics to identify critical correlations between user behavior and business success.

• Conduct and Socialize Data Triangulation & Synthesis:Utilize behavioral analytics, quantitative data, and qualitative insights to produce actionable insights. Establish channels to socialize learnings to stakeholders in order to drive impact.

Leadership Competencies

• Problem Solving: Designs scalable frameworks and vision-backed learning agendas to prioritize high-impact problems across multiple domains; leverages technical and data fluency to navigate complex trade-offs and drive innovative, customer-centric solutions that maximize business value

• Judgment: Prioritizes high-leverage opportunities and eliminates duplicative work to scale impact across the organization; guides teams through ambiguity with empathy while maintaining focus on clear business priorities and consistent delivery

• Influence: Acts as a trusted strategic advisor, leveraging deep expertise and cross-functional partnerships to influence senior-level decision-making and drive the adoption of human-centered strategies in service of high-stakes business outcomes

• Teamwork: Collaborates broadly, and contributes regularly to internal knowledge platforms and events; proactively and effectively aligns work to business needs, focusing on shared goals over their own agenda

• Communication: Translates complex data and behavioral findings into compelling narratives for senior stakeholders; ensures clarity in two-way dialogue across functions

Basic Qualifications:

• At least 4 years of professional experience in User Experience Research, Data Science, or Customer Experience Research

• At least 4 years of experience aggregating, collecting, and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data

• At least 3 years of experience autonomously leading multi-stakeholder projects or research programs

Preferred Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in User Intelligence, Human Factors, or behavioral data analysis

• Background in leading research in enterprise settings  

• History of leading small to medium teams of researchers 

• Experience conducting structured, quantitative jobs-to-be-done studies

• Experience leveraging AI tools (Gemini, Claude, NotebookLM) to accelerate insight creation

• Experience building automated research workflows with AI tools

• Proven track record of triangulating multiple data sources (behavioral analytics, survey data, and primary research) to inform product roadmaps

• Advanced degree in Human Factors, HCI, Statistics, Data Science, or Behavioral Economics

At this time, Capital One will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization for this position.

The minimum and maximum full-time annual salaries for this role are listed below, by location. Please note that this salary information is solely for candidates hired to perform work within one of these locations, and refers to the amount Capital One is willing to pay at the time of this posting. Salaries for part-time roles will be prorated based upon the agreed upon number of hours to be regularly worked.

Candidates hired to work in other locations will be subject to the pay range associated with that location, and the actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

Capital One offers a comprehensive, competitive, and inclusive set of health, financial and other benefits that support your total well-being. Learn more at theCapital One Careers website. Eligibility varies based on full or part-time status, exempt or non-exempt status, and management level.