Senior UX Researcher at Grindr in San Francisco, CA

Job description

About the Team: Grindr is an AI-native platform powering how millions of gay people connect globally. With 15M+ monthly users, 130B+ annual messages, and a team of fewer than 200, we move fast, stay lean, and tackle technical problems at a scale few companies ever see. The Design team at Grindr is a small, high-ownership function embedded at the center of the product - working across Core, Growth, Monetization, International, and an expanding Health portfolio. Research here isn't a support queue. It's a strategic voice that shapes product direction, informs business decisions, and connects the team to the lived experiences of our community. You'll join a lean UXR team with real breadth across the product portfolio, partnering daily with Product, Design, and Data Science to bring user evidence to the decisions that matter most. This is a rare opportunity to do consequential research on topics that genuinely affect people's lives - including sexual health, identity, and community - at a company that is uniquely positioned and deeply motivated to get it right. Talent forged at Grindr will stand out anywhere. At Grindr, we operate in Grindr Mode. Moderately hardcore day to day, truly hardcore when it counts. It's about doing great work without burning out. Outcomes over outputs. Smart, driven people who raise your bar, with room to live full lives. This is a hybrid role based in our San Francisco office and will require you to be in person Tuesdays and Thursdays. About the Job: • Own end-to-end research for a defined set of product areas - from framing the right questions to delivering findings that drive real product and business decisions • Design and execute mixed-method research programs, combining qualitative depth with quantitative rigor to produce insights that hold up across scale • Proactively identify the highest-leverage research opportunities within your product areas, building a research agenda that gets ahead of the roadmap rather than responding only to incoming requests. • Partner closely with Product, Design, and Data Science as a peer strategic voice - shaping roadmaps, surfacing risks, and challenging assumptions with user evidence • Lead research on sensitive and personal topics - including sexual health, men's wellness, and LGBTQ+ experiences - with the trust-building and methodological care these areas demand • Expand the team's quantitative research capabilities, introducing scalable methods and frameworks that raise the bar for how UXR operates at Grindr Role Requirements: • 5+ years of product research experience, with a track record of independently owning research within a complex, fast-moving product environment • Strong mixed-method foundation with demonstrated quantitative depth - surveys at scale, conjoint analysis, statistical analysis, or equivalent • Experience conducting research on sensitive or personal topics, with a demonstrated ability to build trust, ensure participant safety, protect participant privacy and navigate nuanced subject matter with care • Proven cross-functional influence - you've shaped product decisions, not just informed them, working as a peer to PM and Design rather than a downstream service • Experience working on consumer products with a large and diverse user base, ideally in social, dating, health, or community-driven contexts • Clear, compelling communication of research findings to both working teams and senior stakeholders - you translate complexity into clarity You May Thrive in This Role If You: • Thrive with real ownership and a wide aperture - you're energized by broad scope, not slowed down by it • Are AI-native or rapidly becoming so - you actively use AI tools in your workflow and are always looking for new ways to leverage them • Care deeply about the communities you research - you bring genuine curiosity and respect to work that touches people's identities, health, and relationships • Are comfortable operating in a lean, high-trust environment where you defi