Staff UX Researcher - AI & Emerging Products

<div class="content-intro"><p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>Get to know Okta<br><br></strong></span>Okta is The World’s Identity Company. We free everyone to safely use any technology, anywhere, on any device or app. Our flexible and neutral products, Okta Platform and Auth0 Platform, provide secure access, authentication, and automation, placing identity at the core of business security and growth.<br><br>At Okta, we celebrate a variety of perspectives and experiences. We are not looking for someone who checks every single box - we’re looking for lifelong learners and people who can make us better with their unique experiences. <br><br>Join our team! We’re building a world where Identity belongs to you.</p></div><p><strong>About the Role:</strong><strong><br></strong>We’re looking for an experienced AI User Research Scientist to help shape the future of AI-driven security products at Auth0. This is not a traditional usability-focused role. You will be responsible for deeply understanding user needs, validating assumptions behind AI-powered solutions, and determining whether what we're building will be trusted, adopted, and ultimately deliver product-market fit.</p> <p>In this highly strategic and cross-functional position, you'll work closely with engineers, AI researchers, product managers, and designers to ensure our LLM-based and agentic systems are grounded in human needs, secure by design, and aligned with business viability. This role requires a unique blend of user research expertise, market understanding, strategic foresight, and technical fluency in the AI product development process, which differs significantly from traditional software product development.</p> <p><strong>Key Responsibilities:</strong></p> <ol> <li><strong> Strategic Product-Market Fit and Assumption Validation</strong></li> </ol> <ul> <li>Lead research to test key assumptions around user behavior, trust, mental models, and willingness to adopt AI-powered security tools.</li> <li>Explore early-stage product concepts to assess user needs, barriers to adoption, and potential monetization strategies.</li> <li>Provide insights that shape long-term product direction and investment in AI capabilities.</li> </ul> <ol> <li><strong> Human-AI Interaction Research</strong></li> </ol> <ul> <li>Design and execute studies that explore how users perceive, trust, and interact with LLMs, agents, and autonomous systems.</li> <li>Investigate failure modes, expectations, and control preferences in high-risk domains such as identity and security.<br>Help product and engineering teams balance automation with human agency.</li> </ul> <ol> <li><strong> Cross-Functional Collaboration with AI Engineering</strong></li> </ol> <ul> <li>Partner with AI engineers, product managers, and designers to understand technical foundations (e.g., prompting strategies, model capabilities, hallucination risks).</li> <li>Translate user insights into meaningful guidance for cross-functional teams.</li> <li>Serve as the user-facing voice in discussions of model behavior, risk tradeoffs, and security boundaries.</li> <li>Able to engage confidently with AI/ML and engineering teams, asking sharp technical questions, understanding tradeoffs, and connecting user insights to feasibility and system behavior.</li> </ul> <ol> <li><strong> Research Methods Experimentation</strong></li> </ol> <ul> <li>Use mixed methods to uncover insights, from in-depth interviews and concept tests to survey design and behavioral analysis.</li> <li>Co-design experiments with PMs and data scientists to explore key hypotheses in live or staged environments.</li> <li>Identify signals in ambiguous or low-data contexts using creative methodological approaches.</li> </ul> <ol> <li><strong> Trust, Ethics Safety</strong></li> </ol> <ul> <li>Probe how users form trust with AI, especially in sensitive, security-first domains.</li> <li>Investigate concerns around data use, autonomy, explainability, and decision boundaries.< ... (truncated, view full listing at source)