Principal User Researcher, AI

Job Requisition ID # 26WD98050 Position Overview Autodesk is exploring ways to help customers work more effectively across complex design and make workflows, including how agentic capabilities can better connect user intent to outcomes. Reporting to the Sr. Manager, AI User Research, the Principal User Researcher will define and lead research strategy for emerging customer experiences that incorporate agentic capabilities into Autodesk workflows and platforms. This role operates at the intersection of research, product, design, engineering, and AI evaluation—ensuring customer insight meaningfully shapes how new experiences are researched, prototyped, evaluated, and evolved over time. This role will help establish a modern approach to user research for adaptive, AI-enabled systems by integrating qualitative insight, behavioral analysis, experimentation, and continuous feedback mechanisms into product development. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in human-centered research, systems thinking, and ambiguity navigation, with the ability to influence both near-term product decisions and long-term strategic direction. You will operate with a high degree of autonomy in ambiguous and evolving problem spaces. Success requires not only excellence in research craft, but the ability to define new practices, influence system-level decisions, and connect customer insight directly to product and business outcomes. The Principal User Researcher will play a key role in helping Autodesk design experiences that are intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, and grounded in real customer needs. Location: Bay Area, hybrid/remote. Travel: Some light travel across North America for meetings and conferences. Responsibilities Research Strategy & System-Level Impact Define and lead end-to-end research strategy for emerging AI-enabled and agentic customer experiences Establish research as a core input into product, evaluation, and system design decisions—not solely downstream validation Translate customer cognition, trust, behavior, and workflow patterns into actionable signals that inform roadmap and experience optimization Help shape how Autodesk defines and measures customer value within agentic systems and workflows Influence long-term product and experience direction through research-backed insights and frameworks Agentic AI Evaluation & Feedback Systems Design and operationalize user-centered evaluation frameworks that extend beyond technical accuracy into trust, ambiguity handling, usability, and cognitive outcomes Partner with Product, Engineering, and AI/ML teams to align technical performance with customer experience quality Build and evolve continuous feedback loops that connect real-world usage signals to product iteration Help define evaluation as an ongoing product capability that supports adaptive, learning-oriented experiences Ensure evaluation frameworks are scalable, reusable, and aligned with iterative product development cycles Behavioral Insight & Workflow Intelligence Lead research that uncovers latent customer needs through behavioral data, workflow analysis, and real-world usage patterns Identify high-impact workflow and automation opportunities across design and make experiences Design research approaches that support continuous learning and iterative product improvement Translate insights into product opportunities that reduce friction, improve efficiency, and strengthen customer outcomes Partner cross-functionally to embed insight generation into product experiences and systems Trust, Adoption & Human-AI Interaction Define and lead research on trust formation, calibration, and recovery within AI-enabled customer experiences Identify interaction patterns that drive adoption—or create barriers to adoption—across different customer segments Develop frameworks and guidance for human-AI collaboration experiences that evolve with users over time Partner with Product and Design teams to ensure onboard ... (truncated, view full listing at source)