User Researcher

About the User Researcher Role at Clearwater Analytics

We’re seeking a User Researcher with extensive B2B experience to join Clearwater Analytics. This role is crucial for understanding complex institutional workflows, validating product direction, and enhancing end-to-end user experiences across Clearwater’s platform. You will collaborate closely with Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers, executing research throughout the product lifecycle and translating insights into actionable recommendations.

A key aspect of this role involves confidently navigating the unique participant recruiting challenges inherent in B2B environments, such as reaching specialized roles, managing limited availability, and adhering to compliance requirements. You will clearly communicate tradeoffs, timelines, and mitigation strategies to ensure successful research outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Plan and conduct end-to-end research across discovery, concepting, design validation, and post-launch evaluation using various methods (e.g., interviews, contextual inquiry, workflow studies, usability testing, surveys, diary studies, and analytics-informed research).
• Partner with Product, Design, and Engineering to formulate research questions, define hypotheses, and integrate research into delivery cycles.
• Develop research plans, screeners, discussion guides, and test protocols specifically for institutional, role-based workflows (e.g., accounting, operations, portfolio/asset roles, reporting).
• Own and lead participant recruiting strategy for B2B research, including identifying target roles, defining inclusion/exclusion criteria, and determining sample approaches.
• Proactively identify and articulate recruiting risks, such as low incidence roles, account constraints, NDA/compliance needs, and busy end-of-month cycles.
• Collaborate with Client Services, Product, Sales, and account stakeholders to ensure responsible recruitment and minimize customer burden.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of user research experience, with significant B2B/SaaS research exposure.
• Demonstrated ability to research complex products and specialized user roles.
• Strong qualitative research skills (interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing) and practical synthesis methods.
• Proven experience partnering with Design, Product, and Engineering in iterative product development.
• Ability to clearly articulate recruiting challenges and propose realistic plans, tradeoffs, and mitigation strategies.
• Experience delivering insights in compelling ways through presentations, workshops, reports, and evidence-grounded storytelling.
• A portfolio or case studies showcasing your process and impact (problem framing → method choice → insights → influence on product decisions).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, investment operations, accounting, reporting, risk, or other regulated/complex domains.
• Quantitative research capability (survey design, analysis, triangulation with product analytics).
• Familiarity with enterprise constraints: permissions/roles, audits, compliance, procurement, and data sensitivity.
• Experience building or scaling a research practice (templates, repositories, standards, intake processes).
• Tools familiarity (examples): Dovetail/EnjoyHQ, UserTesting/Lookback, Qualtrix/SurveyMonkey, Optimal Workshop, Figma, Jira/Confluence.

Core Skills

• B2B recruiting strategy and stakeholder coordination
• Workshop facilitation and cross-functional alignment
• Synthesis and insight communication (clear, actionable, prioritized)
• Systems thinking and comfort with complex workflows/data
• Pragmatic decision-making in fast-paced delivery environments

Key skills/competency

• User Research
• B2B SaaS
• Qualitative Research
• Participant Recruiting
• Product Lifecycle
• Stakeholder Coordination
• Workflow Analysis
• Usability Testing
• Insight Communication
• Fintech Domain