Staff Design Researcher

Who We Are

At Twilio, we're shaping the future of communications from our homes. We provide innovative solutions to businesses and empower developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences. Our remote-first culture fosters connection and global inclusion, ensuring every team member makes an impact regardless of location. We're revolutionizing how the world interacts, constantly acquiring new skills and experiences that make work rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands.

We leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) for an efficient, fair, and transparent hiring process, though all final decisions are made by real Twilions.

The Role: Staff Design Researcher

Join us as a Staff Design Researcher on our Emerging Technology and Innovation (ETI) team.

About the Job

We are seeking a visionary and entrepreneurial Staff Design Researcher passionate about building the future. In this role, you will lead Horizon 3 innovation, imagining, shaping, and validating breakthrough product concepts that could fundamentally transform the enterprise landscape over the next 3-5+ years. Your mandate is to look beyond current product lines and incremental enhancements, helping to envision the future based on technological advances across AI/ML, AGI, quantum computing, blockchain, and more. Working with world-class researchers, engineers, and product managers, you will take bold, unproven ideas from whiteboard to working prototype, navigating ambiguity, systematically de-risking concepts, and driving structured experimentation.

You will help us reimagine future experiences for our customers. Success will be measured by your ability to identify and validate opportunities that can shape the next era of growth for Twilio and the broader technology ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Define & Lead Research: Lead end-to-end qualitative and quantitative design research across early-stage, exploratory projects; rigorously uncover customer needs, pain points, and emerging trends.
• Strategy & Opportunity Framing: Provide thought leadership and frameworks that connect research findings to business and product strategy; help teams prioritize opportunities and guide decision-making.
• Synthesize Insights and communicate effectively: Distill complex data into clear, actionable narratives and frameworks for senior executives, product managers, and engineers.
• Drive Experimentation: Collaborate with Product and Design to rapidly test new hypotheses via concepts, prototypes, and MVPs.
• Customer Advocacy: Represent the voice of the customer in every conversation. Inspire teams to build solutions that surprise and delight customers.

Qualifications

Twilio values diverse experiences and encourages all qualified individuals to apply.

Required

• 5+ years of experience in design research, user research, or a related field—preferably with time spent in innovation or new product development environments.
• Proven track record of leading ambiguous, zero-to-one research programs in fast-paced, high-growth tech companies.
• Mastery of a wide array of research methods, from ethnography and contextual inquiry to co-creation workshops and rapid concept validation.
• Experience with qualitative and quantitative data, and ability to easily switch between big-picture thinking and tactical execution.
• Exceptional communication, storytelling, and influence skills—executive presence a must.
• Passion for working on highly cross-functional teams and an entrepreneurial, “builder” mentality.
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in HCI, Design, Psychology, Anthropology, or a related discipline.

Desired

• Experience working with AI/ML technology and customer engagement platforms.
• Experience working in trust, security, or fraud prevention.
• Experience guiding innovation in a multi-sided platform environment.
• Portfolio or case studies illustrating your impact on breakthrough product or business opportunities.

Location & Travel

This role will be remote, but is not eligible to be hired in San Francisco, CA, Oakland, CA, San Jose, CA, or the surrounding areas. Occasional travel may be required for project or team in-person meetings.

What We Offer & Compensation

Working at Twilio offers competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and more. Offerings vary by location.

The estimated pay ranges for this role (for specific listed states) are:

• Based in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont or Washington D.C.: $141,520.00-$176,900.00.
• Based in Washington D.C., Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts or California (outside of the San Francisco Bay Area): $149,840.00-$187,300.00.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay area, California: $166,400.00-$208,000.00.

This role may be eligible for Twilio’s equity plan and corporate bonus plan. Benefits generally include health care insurance, 401(k) retirement account, paid sick time, paid personal time off, and paid parental leave. Starting salary is determined by non-discriminatory factors like skills, experience, and geographic location.

Key skills/competency

• Design Research
• User Research
• Innovation Strategy
• Product Development
• Qualitative Research
• Quantitative Analysis
• Experimentation Design
• AI/ML Technologies
• Customer Empathy
• Storytelling