Research Operations Lead (Fixed Term)

Who We Are At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people. We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you. We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team. Our Values If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.Who You Are As a Research team, we're evolving how we work, investing in Insights Fluency for all Justworkers, and building an operational foundation that can scale with us. You’ll build research systems that scale, working with significant autonomy, setting direction rather than just executing on it, and partnering closely with leadership to shape how insight drives decisions at Justworks for years to come. You're comfortable in the strategic weeds of research methodology, and you thrive in architecting the systems, tools, and workflows that make research and strategic insight possible at scale. You've built ResearchOps infrastructure before — and you know that the future isn't just about process documentation and vendor contracts. You approach every workflow with a clarifying question: what truly needs human judgment here, and what can be automated? The answer shapes everything — from how insights reach the people who need them, to how any Justworker can access what we know and act on it, to how we scale research and strategy from specialized practices into organization-wide capabilities. Your Success Profile What You Will Work On Transform our operational foundation to support research at scale Lead research operations. Define the vision, roadmap, and OKRs for Research & Insights operations in close partnership with the Senior Director. Identify where shared vs. dedicated infrastructure creates the most leverage, translate it into a sequenced operating plan you own end to end, and track metrics to demonstrate impact and drive improvement. Transform our participant recruitment infrastructure. Design and scale a system that gives researchers — and Justworkers Who Do Research (JWDR) — reliable, ethical, and efficient access to customers. Move us from ad hoc to repeatable to self-service. Harness our research community. Define where researchers' involvement creates the most leverage and build the coordination systems that make their contributions scalable. The goal: an ops practice owned by the whole community, not dependent on any one person. Define our research ethics and data governance standards. Own the frameworks, consent workflows, and privacy practices that ensure all research at Justworks meets our standards for participant trust and data protection. Automate everything that doesn't need a human. Design and build AI-powered agents and workflows that handle what doesn't require human expertise: surfacing prior research, routing insights, synthesizing patterns, scheduling participants, distributing the drumbeat of insight. The goal is to free researchers and Justworkers to focus on work only humans can do.   Increase insights fluency across the organization Build the operational backbone for our Insights Fluency program. EvolveDevelop the playbooks, tools, templates, and training that empower Justworkers across the company to conduct research responsibly and effectively. Connect every Justworker to insight and strategy. Build the channels, automations, and workflows that automatically route the right insight to the right person at the right time. Partner with Corporate Strategy so every Justworker understands where the company is headed — anchoring decisions in strategy, not just intuition. Establish and govern our Research Knowledge Orchestration system. Build a living repository that makes it easy for anyone to find what we know, with metadata frameworks and freshness policies that keep it trustworthy over time.   How You Will Do Your Work How results are achieved matters as much as the results themselves. Your foundational skills and attributes are anchored in: Strategic and systems thinking — You connect a recruiting pain point to a knowledge gap to a missed business decision and design a coherent operational response. You build for today and architect for scale. Consultative — You build relationships, understand problems, and co-design solutions through open-ended questions and active listening. You don't impose systems — you build them with the people who'll use them. Autonomous and self-directed — You operate with minimal oversight, proactively identifying what needs to happen and making it happen. You own the strategy and are accountable for outcomes. Stakeholder influence — You build trust and alignment across Research, Design, Product, Engineering, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, and Procurement — making the case for infrastructure investment with data and story. Ethical practice — You bring care and rigor to participant privacy, data governance, and research ethics. Good operations protect people, not just processes. AI-forward — You ask of every workflow: what requires human judgment, and what can be automated? You don't just use AI tools — you build with them, replacing manual work with intelligent automation. In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for: Camaraderie — Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You're an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others. Openness — You