Research Operations Lead at Justworks

Research Operations Lead

New York, New York

Who We Are

At Justworks, you'll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.

We're helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We're data-driven and never stop iterating. If you'd like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we'd love to hear from you.

We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.

Our Values

If this sounds like you, you'll fit right in.

Who You Are

As a Research team, we're evolving how we work, investing in Insights Fluency for all Justworkers, and building an operational foundation that can scale with us. You'll build research systems that scale, working with significant autonomy, setting direction rather than just executing on it, and partnering closely with leadership to shape how insight drives decisions at Justworks for years to come.

You're comfortable in the strategic weeds of research methodology, and you thrive in architecting the systems, tools, and workflows that make research and strategic insight possible at scale. You've built ResearchOps infrastructure before and you know that the future isn't just about process documentation and vendor contracts. You approach every workflow with a clarifying question: what truly needs human judgment here, and what can be automated? The answer shapes everything from how insights reach the people who need them, to how any Justworker can access what we know and act on it, to how we scale research and strategy from specialized practices into organization-wide capabilities.

What You Will Work On

Transform Our Operational Foundation To Support Research At Scale

• Lead research operations. Define the vision, roadmap, and OKRs for Research & Insights operations in close partnership with the Senior Director. Identify where shared vs. dedicated infrastructure creates the most leverage, translate it into a sequenced operating plan you own end to end, and track metrics to demonstrate impact and drive improvement.
• Transform our participant recruitment infrastructure. Design and scale a system that gives researchers and Justworkers Who Do Research (JWDR) reliable, ethical, and efficient access to customers. Move us from ad hoc to repeatable to self-service.
• Harness our research community. Define where researchers' involvement creates the most leverage and build the coordination systems that make their contributions scalable. The goal: an ops practice owned by the whole community, not dependent on any one person.
• Define our research ethics and data governance standards. Own the frameworks, consent workflows, and privacy practices that ensure all research at Justworks meets our standards for participant trust and data protection.
• Automate everything that doesn't need a human. Design and build AI-powered agents and workflows that handle what doesn't require human expertise: surfacing prior research, routing insights, synthesizing patterns, scheduling participants, distributing the drumbeat of insight. The goal is to free researchers and Justworkers to focus on work only humans can do.

Increase Insights Fluency Across The Organization

• Build the operational backbone for our Insights Fluency program. Evolve develop the playbooks, tools, templates, and training that empower Justworkers across the company to conduct research responsibly and effectively.
• Connect every Justworker to insight and strategy. Build the channels, automations, and workflows that automatically route the right insight to the right person at the right time. Partner with Corporate Strategy so every Justworker understands where the company is headed anchoring decisions in strategy, not just intuition.
• Establish and govern our Research Knowledge Orchestration system. Build a living repository that makes it easy for anyone to find what we know, with metadata frameworks and freshness policies that keep it trustworthy over time.

How You Will Do Your Work

How results are achieved matters as much as the results themselves. Your foundational skills and attributes are anchored in:

• Strategic and systems thinking You connect a recruiting pain point to a knowledge gap to a missed business decision and design a coherent operational response. You build for today and architect for scale.
• Consultative You build relationships, understand problems, and co-design solutions through open-ended questions and active listening. You don't impose systems you build them with the people who'll use them.
• Autonomous and self-directed You operate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying what needs to happen and making it happen. You own the strategy and are accountable for outcomes.
• Stakeholder influence You build trust and alignment across Research, Design, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement making the case for infrastructure investment with data and story.
• Ethical practice You bring care and rigor to participant privacy, data governance, and research ethics. Good operations protect people, not just processes.
• AI-forward You ask of every workflow: what requires human judgment, and what can be automated? You don't just use AI tools you build with them, replacing manual work with intelligent automation.

In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for:

• Camaraderie Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You're an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
• Openness Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You're curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others.
• Grit You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You're committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude.
• Integrity Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You're honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example.
• Simplicity Be like Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Qualifications

• Proven track record (6-8 years, with demonstrated experience at a staff or principal level) of building and scaling operational systems and governance structures - ideally in the context of market or UX research
• Experience working in a technology environment, including a deep understanding of experience design, user research, and product development processes
• Exposure to research methods in UX, market research, design research, and/or strategic research, and an interest in going deeper
• Experience applying AI tools and building AI-powered workflows for knowledge retrieval, research synthesis, automation, or insight distribution
• Strong cross-functional partnership and lateral leadership skills, with experience working across Product, Design, Marketing, Engineering, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement
• Track record of operating independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Experience with research and insight management platforms such as Great Question, Qualtrics, Dovetail, User Interviews, dscout, and Figma
• Background in compliance-sensitive environments (e.g., fintech, SaaS, enterprise B2B) is a strong plus

Diversity At Justworks

Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.

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