Staff User Researcher

Team/ Role Paragraph: 

As a Staff Design Researcher on the Platform Design and Research team within the Platform group, you'll set the research vision and practice across the systems, tools, and infrastructure that power Coinbase. This team works across Identity, Payments, Developer Experience, Financial Infrastructure, Compliance, and other foundational areas. You'll define how Platform understands its customers, combining deep research with hands-on design to translate ambiguous problem spaces into clear product opportunities, high-quality deliverables, and shipped solutions.

What you’ll do: 

• Define and own the research practice for Platform, setting the vision, strategy, prioritization, and engagement models that connect customer insight to product and design decisions across the organization.
• Own and run Platform's recurring internal CSAT program, designing surveys, setting cadence, analyzing results, and reporting to leadership to track how internal teams experience Platform tools and surface actionable opportunities.
• Conduct and lead generative, evaluative, and mixed-methods research with engineers, technical leads, product managers, and end customers, upleveling existing methods and identifying new approaches to address ambiguous research problems across Identity, Payments, Developer Experience, internal tooling, and compliance.
• Drive process and execution that result in high-quality design deliverables, including polished prototypes, interaction flows, and visual storytelling that set the standard and bar for your product area.
• Partner with senior product, design, and engineering leaders as a cross-functional lead in all stages of strategy planning, influencing roadmaps and investment decisions through evidence-based research and well-crafted design presentations.
• Drive improvements in design consistency and integrity across your product area, contributing to existing design systems and creating new solutions when needed, while building research repositories and frameworks that scale research impact across the broader Design and Research organization.
• Coach and mentor designers and product partners on both research rigor and design craft, raising the quality bar and expanding capacity beyond the core team.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 10+ years of professional experience in user research and product design, including setting research vision and leading research for complex, technical, or platform-scale products and systems.
• Demonstrated ability to operate at a strategic level, shaping product direction and influencing senior cross-functional and executive stakeholders through research-driven insights and compelling design presentations.
• Expert-level proficiency in design and prototyping tools (Figma or equivalent), with the ability to produce polished, high-quality deliverables that communicate customer experience and product direction to leadership.
• Strong command of qualitative research methods, with proven judgment about which methods fit which questions, and demonstrated ability to uplevel methods and introduce new approaches to solve ambiguous problems.
• Track record of building research practices, operating models, or measurement programs (such as recurring CSAT or voice-of-customer programs) that scaled impact beyond a single team, and driving design system adoption and contribution across a product area.
• Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.