Staff, Experience Researcher – Research Ops

Walmart Walmart · Retail · Bentonville, AR

This role focuses on building and refining the operational backbone of a user research team within Sam's Club. It involves managing research planning, participant recruitment, process standardization, tools and infrastructure, insight management, and team enablement. While the role explores GenAI applications, its core function is research operations and process improvement, not direct AI/ML model development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner with research leadership to prioritize work, manage backlogs, and ensure visibility across studies and initiatives.
  2. Build and scale systems for participant management, leading end-to-end recruitment operations while ensuring strong ethics, privacy, and participant experience standards.
  3. Develop and maintain research templates, playbooks, and best practices—enabling consistent, high-quality research and empowering designers to run studies independently.
  4. Manage research tools, vendors, and workflows; continuously improve systems to increase efficiency and reduce friction, including exploring GenAI applications.
  5. Establish systems for storing, tagging, and sharing insights, while helping communicate the impact of research across the organization.

Skills

Required

  • ResearchOps, DesignOps, UX Research, or a similar role supporting research at scale
  • strong understanding of research methods, recruitment, and experimentation
  • Ability to bring clarity to ambiguity by building frameworks, processes, and scalable systems that enable teams to operate effectively
  • Strong partnership skills with the ability to collaborate across design, product, engineering, and business teams to drive alignment and adoption of research
  • Comfort working in fast-paced, evolving environments where processes are not yet fully defined—and a drive to improve them
  • Service-Oriented Mindset
  • Storytelling & Communication
  • 6+ years of experience in ResearchOps, DesignOps, UX Research, or a related role supporting research at scale
  • Experience building and managing research operations systems, including participant recruitment, tooling, and workflows
  • Strong program and project management skills with the ability to prioritize and drive multiple initiatives
  • Deep understanding of research methods, ethics, and participant management best practices
  • Experience standardizing processes (templates, playbooks, documentation) to enable scale and consistency
  • Proven ability to partner cross-functionally and support research adoption across product, design, and business teams
  • Experience managing research tools and vendors (e.g., Qualtrics, UserTesting, DScout, etc.)
  • Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience

Nice to have

  • Advanced degree in HCI, Behavioral Science, Design, Business, or related field
  • Experience enabling non-researchers (e.g., designers) to conduct research effectively
  • Strong storytelling skills (e.g., presentations, video, insight communication)
  • Experience exploring or implementing GenAI in research workflows

What the JD emphasized

  • operational backbone
  • scalable systems
  • research at scale
  • systems thinking & structure
  • operational agility
  • processes are not yet fully defined