Lead Design Researcher

Our financial client is looking for a Lead Design Researcher for 12+ months, starting in April. You will provide thought leadership, strategic advice and lend your expertise to stakeholders and peers to execute high complexity research. This is a hybrid role requiring 3 days onsite in downtown Toronto. What you'll be doing as the Lead Design Researcher: - Acting as a hands-on leader both creating the design research strategy and executing, synthesizing and analyzing.- Advocating for the Design Research practice within larger Design team and organization. - Becoming a trusted advisor to internal team and stakeholders. - Facilitating complex design critiques, evaluating designs for inclusivity and providing expert advice to teams. - Coaching more junior design team members. - Directing discussions with cross-functional teams about Design Research strategy.- Providing recommendations about the role and application of Design Research. - Directing peers on research methodologies, fielding and analysis to ensure excellence and consistency aligned to Design systems as products evolve.- Communicating implications and recommendations based on outcomes of research activities. - Contributing to development of new approaches to research methodologies, fielding, and analysis and articulating rationale. - Initiating collaboration to explore shared questions and create deeper understanding of user behavior, motivations, needs and mindsets across Journeys. • Understanding business needs, goals and objectives and uses that understanding to evaluate, prioritize and create research activities that bring clarity to stakeholders. - Co-leading highly complex group tasks and/or Design Research projects across multiple work streams/journeys.- Working with team members and stakeholders to develop systems for evaluating and prioritizing research.- Developing unbiased and non-leading questions for research work. - Designing multi-stage research activities of medium to high complexity. - Initiating opportunities to validate whether designs follow the principles and requirements of Accessibility and Inclusive Design, including a methodical application of metadata and hidden text to support assistive tech. - Moderating sessions covering highly ambiguous topics.- Collating and synthesizing complex data sets from primary or secondary research. - Leading team members + stakeholders in synthesizing and translating quantitative and qualitative data into core themes, identifying implications and client needs, creating easily understood, actionable insights and making Design decisions. - Contributing new practice examples, innovations, and proofs-of-concept from research and experiments. - Creating and presenting engaging content and research work to senior/executive stakeholders.Skills and Experience: - 7-10 years of experience as a Design Researcher or in similar roles. - Strong technical depth and breadth of expertise in Design Research practice theory / tools. - Expert knowledge of Design Research methodologies- Experience working on cross-functional teams- Experience launching digital products- Experience coaching and mentoring team members Financial Services