Job Title: Senior UX Researcher
Department: Product
Location: London or Sheffield
Working Pattern: Hybrid, includes 3 days each week in the office
Contract Type: Full time, permanent
Salary: Up to £65,000 per annum
At Tes we are on a mission to power schools and enable great teaching worldwide, by delivering EdTech solutions that give educators the tools to succeed. From safeguarding and compliance to staff and pupil management, our innovative and flexible software and services help teachers and school leaders worldwide to provide the best education to millions of children.
With more than 13 million educators in our community, combined with our working relationships with 25,000 schools in over 100 countries, we have been making a difference for over 100 years.
Role overview
We’ll be upfront: We are in the middle of an organisational transformation. It’s a bit chaotic, and we want to continue our momentum in building strategic, evidence-led decision making. We need a Senior who doesn't just run studies but helps shape organisational understanding. It’s a big opportunity to take the next step in your research journey and support UX Leadership at a strategic level.
We've made significant investment into modern research capabilities, including AI-powered tooling to help us scale customer understanding and reduce operational overhead. As a senior member of the team, you'll play a key role in ensuring we're getting maximum value from these investments while helping define best practices for how AI and research operations work together across the organisation.
This is a practitioner-first role. While you bring strategic oversight, you are a master of research craft and lead by doing, working alongside and supporting a Global UX Team of 12 seasoned Designers and Researchers in the UK and Australia.
Speaking of that Global UX Team, we love in-person workshops, have regular collaborative sessions in our offices, and like to keep things as fun as possible. We do everything with a smile; if we don't enjoy uncovering insights, we're probably asking the wrong questions! We back each other up and work as one big team, no matter how separate our work can feel.
The Mission
Your goal is to bridge the gap between business goals and user needs through evidence, insight, and strategic discovery. You will be hands-on across the entire product lifecycle - from identifying the right problems to solve through to validating whether we've solved them successfully.
You are responsible for producing the strategic research outputs (research strategies, opportunity maps, journey maps, customer understanding, and insight repositories) that help cross-functional teams make confident, user-centred decisions.
Key Responsibilities
Mastery Of Craft
- Hands-on delivery: You will own the research output for your product streams. This means planning and conducting research activities, facilitating interviews and workshops, synthesising findings, and delivering actionable insights that influence product direction.
- Leading by example: You'll set the standard for what good looks like in research design, participant engagement, analysis, storytelling, and insight communication. You'll mentor more junior team members and help elevate our research standards globally.
- Mixed-method expertise: You'll know when to use qualitative or quantitative methods and how to combine them to create a complete picture of user behaviour, needs, and opportunities.
- Research Operations Ownership: We've invested heavily in AI-enabled research tooling and researcher efficiency. You will act as the primary owner and governor of our Askable platform, managing participant recruitment practices, governance standards, panel quality, usage optimisation, and helping evolve how AI can be responsibly integrated into our research workflows. You'll ensure our research operations remain scalable, compliant, and effective as our customer understanding capabilities mature globally.
Strategic Discovery
- Leading Discovery: You will define and drive discovery strategies that help teams navigate ambiguity. You'll take vague business bets, assumptions, and product ideas and turn them into validated opportunities and evidence-backed recommendations.
- Championing User Understanding: Partner with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to ensure teams deeply understand customer needs, behaviours, pain points, and motivations before solutions are developed.
- Stakeholder Diplomacy: Act as a trusted peer to Product colleagues. You'll need to navigate fast-paced delivery phases, using evidence and insight to keep teams focused on solving the right problems.
Research Ops and Governance
- Defining the Manual: You won't just follow research processes; you'll help build them. You'll help define our global research standards, governance frameworks, and "Definition of Ready", ensuring our UK and Australia teams are aligned alongside UX Leadership.
- Research Repository & Knowledge Management: Help us scale how we capture, organise, and share customer knowledge. You'll care about insight management, accessibility, and democratising research across the organisation as much as generating new findings.
- Research Governance: Establish and maintain standards around research quality, participant management, recruitment practices, ethics, consent, and reporting. You'll ensure our research activities remain scalable, consistent, and trustworthy.
- Mentorship: You will be a point of escalation for more junior team members, helping them navigate their own grey areas and become stronger evidence-led practitioners
What kind of person will succeed?
- Experience: 5+ years' experience in UX Research, Product Research, or Service Design roles. Bonus if this is in a SaaS organisation during a large transformation period, and/or EdTech.
- Business-Minded: You understand KPIs and ROI. You connect customer insights to business outcomes, not just research reports.
- A do-er at heart: You get excited about uncovering hidden insights, challenging assumptions, and helping teams make better decisions through evidence.
- High Autonomy: You tell us what we need to learn next, and we back you up.
- Systems Thinker: You can identify patterns across products, journeys, and customer segments, creating strategic understanding rather than isolated findings.
- Insight Storyteller: You can transform complex research into clear narratives that inspire action and influence decision-making across multiple levels of the business.
- Pragmatic Leader: You know when to push for further discovery and when the evidence is strong enough to move forward and maintain business momentum.
Why Join Us Now?
If you want to move away from customers, spend your time producing reports that never influence product direction, enjoy rigid hierarchies, and are comfortable being brought into conversations after the important decisions have already been made, then this probably isn't the place for you.
If you want the autonomy, strategic influence, and creative energy that comes with seniority, and to be able to look back in a year's time and say, "I helped shape how this company understands its customers and builds products around their needs," then we should talk.
We offer the chance to have massive impact during a critical stage of growth. You'll help build not just products, but the research culture, operational foundations, and customer understanding that will shape the future of the organisation.
What do you get in return?
- 25 days annual leave rising to 30
- 5% pension after probation
- State of the art offices
- Access to a range of benefits via My Benefits World
- Free eye care cover
- Life Assurance
- Cycle to Work Scheme
- EAP (Employee assistance programme)
- Quarterly Tes Socials
- Access to an extensive Learning and Development menu
Who are Tes?
Tes is a global Edtech leader, on a mission to empower schools and educators to deliver impactful, inspiring learning experiences worldwide. We understand the unique challenges faced by schools, and our ecosystem is specifically designed to address these needs head-on.
Our intuitive technology streamlines complex tasks, enhances learning experiences, and alleviates the administrative burdens that often overwhelm schools.
By working closely with schools, we provide up-to-date resources, expert guidance, and a technology ecosystem dedicated to innovation and excellence in education. Whether simplifying administrative workflows, creating dynamic classrooms, or advancing professional development, Tes is the trusted partner for schools worldwide.
Join the hundreds of schools already benefiting from the Tes ecosystem. Together, we empower educators to achieve more, ensuring every student thrives in a supportive, well-managed learning environment.
With Tes, excellence in education is not just a goal - it's a sustainable and rewarding reality. For more information about Tes, our products, and our team, visit: www.tes.com.
