Staff UX Research Strategist

StackAdapt is the leading technology company that empowers marketers to reach, engage, and convert audiences with precision. With 465 billion automated optimizations per second, the AI-powered StackAdapt Marketing Platform seamlessly connects brand and performance marketing to drive measurable results across the entire customer journey. The most forward-thinking marketers choose StackAdapt to orchestrate high-impact campaigns across programmatic advertising and marketing channels.

As a Staff UX Research Strategist at StackAdapt, you'll help decide what we build next. You'll lead forward-looking, generative research that identifies new & emerging opportunities and shapes StackAdapt's future product & business strategy. 

This is a hybrid role that blends UX research with market research; you'll move fluidly between understanding users deeply and understanding the market, applying whichever lens the question calls for. It's also a cross-org role: though you'll sit within Product, your partnerships & influence will span the entire StackAdapt organization (including analytics, go-to-market and revenue functions), informing decisions at the business-strategy level, not just the product roadmap.

StackAdapt is a Remote First company, we are open to candidates located anywhere in Canada and the United States for this position.

What you'll be doing:

• Lead end-to-end foundational research on new & emerging product areas, uncovering unmet user needs and shaping them into product opportunities
• Bring market-research rigor to product strategy by identifying ICPs, value propositions, product-market fit, market sizing for new product opportunities
• Develop a point of view on where the market is heading, scanning the competitive & industry landscape to identify where the biggest opportunities and tailwinds are (vs. evaluating one opportunity in isolation)
• Weigh competing opportunities against each other & make a clear, evidence-based case for where StackAdapt should invest; address opportunity costs by identifying which bets are worth it (ie. where the potential upside justifies the risk) while being explicit about the assumptions each recommendation rests on
• Co-own a strategic insights function (in partnership with Product Analytics) that turns signals from across StackAdapt’s business and the market into an early read on emerging opportunities & risks, giving leadership a proactive view of where to focus
• Act as a strategic thought partner to Product & Design leadership, influencing strategy by challenging assumptions & bringing evidence to high-stakes debates 
• Collaborate with the Vertical Solutions team to deepen understanding of key industries, supporting their research & surfacing vertical-specific opportunities
• Partner with Marketing, Sales and Client Services to translate research and market insight into go-to-market strategy, helping shape the positioning & launch of new products to customers
• Level up the UX Research team’s strategic-foresight & market research skills through hands-on coaching & shared playbooks, raising the team’s ability to run this kind of research
• Apply AI fluently across your own research workflow, using it where it genuinely sharpens or speeds the work while knowing where human judgment & rigor still need to lead
• Identify & implement improvements to UXR tools and processes, leveraging AI (where it makes sense) to create repeatable, scalable workflows that raise the quality and efficiency of research across the product org

What you’ll bring to the table:

• 7–10 years of applied research experience, with a portfolio that shows you've surfaced new opportunities and influenced product or business strategy, rather than validating decisions already made
• A blend of UX research & market research experience: alongside qualitative & quantitative UX methods, demonstrated experience with market opportunity assessment, sizing, ideal customer profile / segmentation, value-proposition, product-market-fit and competitive research
• Domain expertise in digital advertising, adtech/martech, data-driven platforms or privacy-sensitive B2B technology markets, with the ability to translate market shifts, customer needs, competitive dynamics, and regulatory trends into product direction
• Demonstrated flexibility and comfort with ambiguity, ill-defined problem spaces and complex domains, paired with systems thinking that connects user, market and business perspectives
• Experience influencing at the senior-leadership level (Director / VP / CTO), building the strategic narrative & business case that secures buy-in on research vision and direction
• Comfort partnering closely with analytics/data teams to pair quantitative signal with qualitative depth and to turn synthesized signals into discovery research
• Experience facilitating workshops (e.g. ideation, co-creation) and driving research into product and strategy decisions, not just awareness
• Hands-on experience integrating AI tools into the research workflow (synthesis, analysis, recruiting, or other stages), ideally with repeatable, scalable processes
• Experience conducting research on AI-powered features or products, and in B2B / platform environments, is a strong asset