Senior Qualitative Researcher - Growth & Marketing

Job Description

Why we’re searching for a Senior Qualitative Researcher. At Wealthfront, we’re on a mission to build a financial system that favors people, not institutions. We will only succeed in this mission if we deeply understand the values, motivations and goals of current and future clients, enabling us to offer products and services that make their best possible futures more attainable. That’s why we’re looking for an exceptional qualitative researcher—someone committed to understanding the variety of human experiences, social relations and structures, and cultural influences and practices. In the last two years, we’ve experienced exceptional growth as the business has reached key milestones. We’ve kept our company lean, focused, and profitable. As Growth and Marketing propel us to new heights, we’re building our teams to scale. We created this new research role to provide consistent, detailed insights into the rich and vivid textures of the lives of current and future clients, and the idiosyncrasies of financial decision making. We’re looking for a researcher who can inspire new Growth and Marketing initiatives through empirical qualitative evidence and creative flair, with the aim of making Wealthfront iconic within our industry and beloved by our target audience. What do we offer you? Research is at the heart of all Wealthfront’s client-facing initiatives—our product process centers continuous learning enabled by research; it is the springboard from which every marketing campaign is launched. Researchers have the responsibility of being leaders within their areas (Growth and Marketing in this case), co-owners of the team’s strategy, roadmap and execution. We’re looking for a Senior User Researcher who craves this responsibility, who wants to use their research tool kit to achieve new levels of impact as an individual contributor and as part of the Growth and Marketing teams. As a Senior User Researcher embedded within the Growth and Marketing teams, you’ll take on client-facing projects intended to make a lasting impact on the growth trajectory of our business. You’ll lead end-to-end projects from study design to insight delivery, in collaboration with partners from product management, design, marketing, data science and engineering. To support you, we’ll surround you with peers and mentors. You’ll collaborate with and report to the Head of Research to define your roadmap and tailor your study design. You’ll work directly with a skilled quantitative researcher to inform and augment your qualitative work. And, best of all, you’ll join a talented team of Wealthfront researchers working across all our products and services, ensuring you’ll have easy access to their accumulated knowledge and experience. Finally, you’ll be a member of both the Product and Marketing organizations, offering you a perspective on everything we create and insight into the most important decisions affecting business growth.

If you join us, you will:

• Lead high-impact research projects that inspire growth and marketing initiatives to increase awareness of Wealthfront and spur word-of-mouth interest within our target audience.
• Uncover ideal client experiences that signal a way forward as we evolve our brand positioning and expand our product and service offerings.
• Dive deep into referral networks to uncover what motivates or inhibits clients from referring their friends or family members to Wealthfront.
• Understand the motivations and circumstances that first prompt someone to consider Wealthfront; the criteria they use to compare us to alternatives; why they choose us (or not) and what barriers they faced in doing so.
• Work with lifecycle marketing to deepen our relationship with existing clients.
• Partner with cross-functional teammates from design, product, marketing, data science, and engineering to identify, plan, and execute research.
• Lead a mix of research types, including exploratory projects to inspire new concepts, as well as evaluative projects that refine design concepts.
• Learn about financial technology, investing, research, design, and so much more!

Relevant experience and mindset we’d like to see:

• You have a graduate degree in the social sciences (Anthropology, Sociology, etc.) with a qualitative research orientation, or an MBA with qualitative research experience.
• 2+ years of industry experience in qualitative research roles.
• You are experienced in partnering with skilled quantitative researchers, and adept at combining qualitative and quantitative evidence to persuade.
• You absolutely love working closely with design, marketing and product leads to design creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
• You are curious, a quick learner, and self-directed in pursuit of high quality outcomes.
• You’re able to communicate effectively and in a compelling way.
• You have deep knowledge and plenty of practical experience with qualitative research methods.
• You’re experienced in running end-to-end qualitative research projects that help define best practices, fill in the gaps in research knowledge, and drive initiatives forward.
• You can quickly design effective, appropriate research approaches within constraints.
• You have a collaborative mindset, with experience working across disciplines and with multiple stakeholders.

Bonus points:

• A passion for financial technology, financial planning, and investing.
• A desire to help develop excellence in user research, push the team into new territories, and empower the entire organization to understand their users better than ever before.

Estimated annual salary range: $132,000 - $152,000 USD plus Equity. Plus benefits include medical, vision, dental, 401K plan, generous time off, parental leave, wellness reimbursements, professional development, employee investing discount, and more! About Wealthfront Wealthfront started with the ambition to transform the investment advisory business, with the goal to unlock access to high quality investment advice for millions who were underserved by the traditional institutions. We built one of the first automated investment products that allows you to invest in a personalized portfolio of thousands of companies in seconds for a remarkably low fee. We then expanded. We now work with partner banks to offer exceptional banking features through a Wealthfront Brokerage Cash Account, which makes it remarkably easy for people to automate their finances end-to-end and eliminated the hassle of money management, all of which resulted in attracting more than $50 billion of our client’s hard earned money, pioneering the robo-advisor category and transforming the broader industry. And yet, we have a long way to go to achieve our mission to build a financial system that favors people, not institutions. Wealthfront’s vision is to make it delightfully easy to build long-term wealth on your own terms. This vision is more relevant than ever because millions more people are getting into the market early and investing their hard earned savings in a handful of stocks. While this is a great way to start, it is inconsistent with building long-term wealth. We want to empower young investors to expand their horizon, and easily explore and execute on a wider range of investing strategies, make informed investment decisions that are consistent with their values and beliefs while also making it effortless to grow and compound their savings exponentially in a way that’s transformational to their lives and their long-term future. For more information please visit www.wealthfront.com . We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Please review our candidate privacy notice . Apply for this job