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Lead UX Researcher

Location Bangalore, India Type Full-time Experience 6+ years Team Design Openings 1 position

About the role

Too many product calls get made on the loudest opinion in the room. As Lead UX Researcher, you own the alternative: you design the studies, run the interviews, and turn messy signal into clear direction the whole team can act on. You’re the person who makes sure the work is grounded in what real people actually do, not what we assume they do.

Because Externo is a service-based consulting company, you won’t research one product forever. You’ll work across many clients and industries, from a fintech onboarding flow one month to an AI copilot the next. You’ll set the research bar for every engagement, and you’re trusted to make the call. There are no layers of approval to research around here.

What you’ll do

  • Plan and run qualitative and quantitative research studies across different clients and industries.
  • Turn findings into crisp, prioritised recommendations, not 40-page decks nobody reads.
  • Build a lightweight, repeatable research practice that keeps running without you.
  • Partner with design, product and engineering from the first day of discovery.
  • Keep the user’s voice in the room for every major decision, and back it with evidence.
  • Present findings directly to clients and help them act on what the research is telling them.

Skills & tools

The toolkit you’ll reach for most. You don’t need every one on day one, but you should be fluent across the core.

Core skills
  • User research
  • In-depth interviews
  • Survey design
  • Usability testing
  • Qual + quant methods
  • Synthesis
  • Journey mapping
  • Research ops
Tools
  • Dovetail
  • Maze
  • UserTesting
  • Figma / FigJam
  • Notion
  • Typeform
  • Basic SQL
  • Spreadsheets

What we’re looking for

  • 6+ years in UX or product research.
  • Strong interviewing and synthesis skills: you find the signal others miss.
  • Experience mixing qual and quant methods, and knowing when each one fits.
  • Clear, persuasive communication that moves a decision, not just a report.
  • You’re comfortable operating with ambiguity, without waiting to be told what to do.
  • You stay calm switching between industries, briefs and clients.

Nice to have

  • Experience researching AI / LLM product experiences.
  • Basic data analysis / SQL to dig into the numbers yourself.
  • Prior team-lead or research-ops experience.
  • Agency or consulting experience juggling multiple clients.

Portfolio required

This role needs a portfolio. Please attach it or paste a link when you apply (use the Resume or portfolio link field on the right). Share a couple of studies you ran end to end: the question, your method, and the decision it changed.

Is this you?

We hire for a specific kind of mind: people who think differently, work out of the box, and would rather try the less obvious idea than the safe one. We stay small and senior on purpose, so everyone here carries real weight.

Please only apply if you genuinely see yourself in this: a curious, self-driven researcher whose work and values line up with ours. If that’s you, we’d love to meet you. If it isn’t, applying will only waste your time and ours, and we’d rather be honest about that up front.

About Externo

Externo is a service-based consulting company. Businesses bring us in as their outside team to design, build and ship digital and AI products that hold up in the real world, across strategy, UX, LLM features, agent workflows, data pipelines and web experiences. We’re senior, remote-first, and work embedded alongside our clients. Get to know us on our About page, see the services we offer, or read the Externo blog.