Senior UX Researcher, YouTube Shorts Creation

Job description

At Google, we "Focus on the user and all else will follow." As a User Experience Researcher (UXR), you make this possible. You will join our multi-disciplinary UX team, collaborating with Engineering and Product Management, to gather insights and create industry-leading products.

You’ll play a critical role in helping your team understand user needs and will drive impact at all stages of product development, ensuring products are useful, usable, and helpful. You will explore user behaviors and motivations by conducting primary research, including: field studies, interviews, diary studies, ethnography, surveys, usability testing, and logs analysis. You will also grow within a supportive UXR community offering mentorship, regular meetups, and exclusive internal tools.

YouTube Shorts is on a mission to give everyone a voice and show them the world through short-form video. On the Shorts Creation team, our mission is to empower everyone to create engaging Shorts, and the Editing workstream is at the heart of this mission by building tools that help creators shape their raw footage into stories.

In this role, you will be the dedicated User Experience Research lead for the Editing workstream within Shorts Creation. You will own the research strategy and collaborate closely with cross-functional partners to define the roadmap and drive product decisions for core and AI-powered editing experiences.

At YouTube, we believe that everyone deserves to have a voice, and that the world is a better place when we listen, share, and build community through our stories. We work together to give everyone the power to share their story, explore what they love, and connect with one another in the process. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge technology and boundless creativity, we move at the speed of culture with a shared goal to show people the world. We explore new ideas, solve real problems, and have fun — and we do it all together.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-quarter user experience research strategy and roadmap for the Shorts Editing workstream, identifying and scoping research opportunities.
• Partner with Product Management, Engineering, and User Experience Design to influence the product roadmap and guide experiences that engage editing gaps.
• Plan and execute foundational and evaluative research on generative AI-assisted editing paradigms, balancing automation with creator control.
• Conduct mixed-methods research and tactical evaluations to streamline the video creation flow and mitigate user friction points.
• Translate research findings and behavioral log analysis into actionable frameworks and benchmarking programs to track tool quality and satisfaction.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
  
• 6 years of experience in an applied research setting (e.g., product or academic), or similar.
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative (mixed-methods) user experience research methods.
• Experience conducting benchmarking, tracking, or measuring product quality and completeness.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master's degree or PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Science, Statistics, Psychology, Anthropology, or related field.
  
• 5 years of experience conducting UX research on products and working with executive leadership (e.g., Director level and above).
  
• 3 years of experience managing projects, and working in a large, matrixed organization.
  
• Experience with creative tools, video/audio editing software, mobile editing, or generative AI technologies.
• Experience collaborating with Data Science to integrate qualitative insights with behavioral log analysis.