Freelance Principal UX Researcher

• Start date: Mid-October
• Involves UX research coaching, establishing and embedding research practices, and research to empower multiple product teams
• Immediate interviews
• Initial contract duration: 4 months (possibility for perm)
• £ day rate (outside IR35)
• 2 days per week in-office (Canary Wharf)

The Role

As a Freelance Principal UX Researcher, you own research across a multi-team client programme. You run strategic discovery that shapes what gets built, set research standards, and make sure customer insight drives prioritisation.

Our clients often have fragmented, siloed research that restarts with every study. You turn it into a working discipline. This is a working leadership role: part hands-on researcher, part standard-setter, part connector.

As a Freelance Principal UX Researcher, you will focus on:

• Leading strategic discovery into what to build first, next and in the vision
• Setting research methods and standards across the programme
• Building research operations so insight is reusable
• Turning insight into roadmap decisions
• Growing and managing researchers

About Red Badger

We’re a tech and product consultancy, building enterprise software products for blue-chip companies, multinationals and PLC’s. The best bit about Red Badger is, of course, the team. We’ve been around for 15+ years now, and we are over 130 strong. We are really proud of our people; we support and learn a lot from each other; we work really hard but have fun doing it. We are a diverse group made up of 22 different nationalities, speaking 17 different languages. Headquartered in London, we also have offices in Cape Town and Leeds.

Your experience

• It’d be great if you can
• It’d be amazing if you can also

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and we believe the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue doing amazing work for our clients.

Strategic discovery

• Lead discovery end-to-end, from plan to a validated view of what customers value
• Pick the right methods, e.g. Jobs-to-be-Done, Kano, MaxDiff, interviews, usability testing to build the right evidence base to support strategic decisions
• Combine qualitative insight with analytics and behavioural data to surface core insights and user needs

Standards and research operations

• Build scalable and repeatable Research Ops including processes, methods, governance, forums, roles and responsibilities
• Set research standards for recruitment, methods, ethics, synthesis and reporting
• Coach designers and clients to run effective strategic and tactical research

Insight to roadmap

• Present findings in commercial, prioritisation-ready terms
• Keep a traceable line from insight to decision

Collaborative leader and trusted advisor

• Work with other Design Leadership roles to ensure that research and the end-to-end user experience reinforce and reflect each other
• Build trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders
• Ability to adjust best practice pragmatically to fit within client contexts to ensure that effective outcomes are met in the best way possible

Build Red Badger capability and profile

• Develop research methods and practices across all Product and Design members
• Support hiring and share knowledge across Red Badger
• Write and speak about our research practice