Director - Research Operations/Innovation - US Research AI Firm

Role Purpose:
The Director of Research Operations is core to company success by building, implementing, and optimizing the research workflow to deliver consistent, high-quality data. By leading the programming, fieldwork, and QA functions, this role is expected to maximize data collection efficiencies and quality, resulting in exceptional customer experiences and repeat/new business. This leadership role is expected to drive product innovation, AI adoption in the project lifecycle, and automation capabilities to improve how company executes research.
Required Skills & Experiences:

- Minimum of 10 years in the insights and market research industry - our ideal candidate has worked in a market research tech agency, leading research operations
- Must have: Proven track record of having built and scaled complex sampling operations for multiple research methodologies (quick-turn, quant & qual), integrating quality check mechanisms.
- Deep experience with survey programming across tools like Qualtrics, Decipher, etc.
- Our ideal candidate has cross-functional experience leading and enabling both internal and external teams on research ops processes from idea to full implementation. For example, pricing & feasibility with Sales, positioning with Marketing, compliance with Operations, innovation with Product, etc. We are not looking for a participant in the process - we are looking for a leader who has been in the driver role standing up net new organizational-wide capabilities from scratch.
- Must have: Extreme proclivity for automation and productization, a leader who has innovated and built efficiencies into processes that otherwise would not exist - we are looking for somebody who can take a manual process and scale it beyond themselves to support hundreds of custom research projects at any given point
- Highly effective people operations leader both cross-functionally and at the function level - specifically in:
- Operationalizing new processes from ideation to full implementation
- Process mapping, organizational design, capacity management, staff forecasting, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance management, conflict resolution, and morale building