Upwork ($UPWK) is the world's largest freelancing website. Each year $1.7 billion of work happens through Upwork, allowing businesses to get more done and helping professionals break free of traditional time and place boundaries and work anytime, anywhere on projects they love. At Upwork, you'll help build on this momentum. Together, we'll create economic and social value on a global scale, providing a trusted online workplace for businesses to connect with extraordinary talent and work without limits. 

As a Senior Researcher on the team, you will have the opportunity to help define the product user experience that matches clients with premier talent. You will deeply affect products and features that help millions of users collaborate with distributed teams and manage their Upwork activities ‘on the go’ through mobile applications. You will be empowered by a strong user centered design culture with a great research to design ratio.

Your Responsibilities:

• Be responsible for the research practice to identify key product / market / audience opportunities to increase our rate of user growth.
• You will collaborate with design, product management, marketing, operations, analytics and data science to influence product strategy.
• Define, plan, and conduct both foundational user research and market research to drive actionable changes in Upwork’s growth strategy.
• Develop a keen understanding of our mobile product usage and funnels.
• Package insights into design tools and assets for the product owners and designers to use (i.e. personas, design principles, scenarios, visualizations, frameworks, etc.).
• You will partner with product, engineering, design, market research, analytics, data science and business leads throughout the research and design process.
• Be a strong advocate for bringing a qualitative lens to our numbers.

What it takes to catch our eye:

• 4+ years of meaningful work experience on a growth or top of the funnel team
• You have a track record of discovering, synthesizing, and socializing actionable insights that have influenced real products.
• Authority in qualitative and quantitative User Experience Research methods (e.g. contextual inquiry, usability testing, interviews, survey sampling and design, experimental design, behavioral data analysis).
• Strong experience working with metrics and A/B tests, and are able to synthesize quantitative data with qualitative stories.
• Experience asking as well as answering questions for businesses.

How to really knock our socks off:

• You have experience working on a marketplace or growth team.
• Demonstrating a knack for asking great questions and reframing research goals.
• Examples of creative research studies using methodologies that might be new to us.

Come change how the world works.

At Upwork you’ll help shape the future of work. From our offices in San Francisco, Mountain View and Chicago, together we’re creating exciting new opportunities for a world of professionals. You’ll be part of a vibrant culture built on shared values: Inspire a boundless future of work, Put our community first, Have a bias towards action, and Build amazing teams. Along the way you’ll have fun and enjoy the perks of a people-first company: Work from Home Wednesday's, daily breakfast and lunch, regular in-office happy hours, top-notch benefits … and more. Check out Upwork’s spotlight on The Muse for a glimpse of our daily work/life balance.

Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.