Principal User Researcher

About this role

About Gen

Gen is a global company dedicated to powering Digital Freedom through its trusted consumer brands including Norton, Avast, LifeLock, MoneyLion and more. Our combined heritage is rooted in financial empowerment and cyber safety for the first digital generations, and today we deliver award-winning cybersecurity, online privacy, identity protection and financial wellness solutions to nearly 500 million users in more than 150 countries.

Together, we share a collective passion and vision to protect consumers and help them grow, manage and secure their digital and financial lives. We’re always looking for smart, fearless and high-impact talent who see AI as a teammate – leveraging it to move faster and deliver meaningful results.

When you’re part of Gen, you’ll have the flexibility, tools and support to do your best work and grow your career – from flexible working options and time off to competitive pay, benefits and well-being programs.

At Gen, we are scrappy and relentlessly customer driven. We create room for healthy debate, experimentation and continuous learning, and we seek out people with different experiences, identities and ideas to join our team. You’ll work with people who back each other, respect each other and understand that our differences are a competitive advantage.

If this sounds like you, we’d love you to be part of Gen.

How We Work

Our hybrid work style (3 days in the office – London) gives us the face-to-face time to have creative conversations, meaningful meetings, make quick decisions and build relationships. And it’s flexible enough to give you the space to do your best work.

About the Role

As a Principal User Researcher at Gen, you’ll own the research strategy for our Partner organisation — one of the most strategically important areas of the business that hasn’t had research support.

The Partner team brings Gen products to market through third-party channels: telcos and ISPs that bundle security with connectivity plans, employers who offer Norton and LifeLock as a workplace benefit, OEM relationships with device manufacturers, and more. This is a B2B2C model: partners are one customer, and the end consumers who receive Gen products through them are another, with different needs, mental models and success metrics.

The Partner organisation is in the middle of a significant transformation, including a new partner portal and configuration platform that lets partners embed and manage Gen products without bespoke engineering work each time.

It’s a fast-moving, high-stakes space that has had no dedicated user research support until now — so you’ll be the first researcher embedded here, building the foundation from scratch: establishing who the end users are, mapping their mental models and pain points, and helping a product and engineering team that’s building its research practice from the ground up understand what it can do for them.

You’ll lead high-impact, high-ambiguity research across multiple partner products and user journeys, developing reusable frameworks and making sure your findings shape what gets built and how it works for users.

Your research will directly shape how the partner delivery platform is built and how activation and onboarding experiences are designed — for both the partners configuring Gen products and the end consumers receiving them.

While Partner is your primary focus, you’ll work alongside the wider research team and may contribute to research on specific Gen products as priorities evolve.

You’ll be a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders, a coach to peers and junior researchers, and a key voice in shaping our research culture at Gen.

You don’t need to be the loudest voice in the room — but you do need to show up with conviction, bring clarity to complex problems, and help teams see what they couldn’t see before.

What You Will Do in This Role / Key Responsibilities

- Build the research foundation for the Partner space — define who the end users are across diverse partner channels (telco, employee benefits, OEM, DCB), map their mental models, pain points and activation journeys.

- Own research strategy across multiple partner product domains — from early generative discovery through evaluative work, including usability testing on partner CX and features — using research so decisions are made on evidence, not guesswork.

- Bring the end user into the room — the Partner team has historically focused on partner relationships and sales; your role is to make the voice of the end customer equally present in product and platform decisions.

- Translate complexity into clarity — synthesise findings into clear recommendations that shift product direction and inspire action at senior levels, including with stakeholders new to working with research.

- Build strong cross-functional relationships with senior stakeholders across product, design, engineering and partner-facing teams, navigating competing priorities with confidence and diplomacy.

- Develop reusable frameworks and playbooks that raise the quality and consistency of research across the team, and coach and mentor peers and junior researchers.

- Use AI well in research, applying AI tools to enhance synthesis and analysis, and help the team and stakeholders level up in how they use AI in research.

What You’ll Need to Be Successful in This Role / About You

- Experience working in environments where the end user is not the direct customer — B2B2C, platform, channel or agency contexts where you’ve held multiple audiences simultaneously.

- A proven track record in user research for digital products, with depth of impact mattering more than years.

- Experience leading end-to-end research across multiple complex product areas, from framing ambiguous problems to delivering strategic insights.

- A track record of driving product vision and business decisions through research, not just informing them.

- Excellent stakeholder management — able to build…