Senior UX Researcher
Location: United States—Remote
A note on length — this posting is intentionally longer than most. That is deliberate. It gives you a realistic preview of the role and clear guidance on how to present your application, so we suggest reading it in full.
About SOVRA
SOVRA is a leading public procurement platform trusted by more than 7,000 government agencies and over 1 million suppliers across North America. Our work sits at the intersection of technology, public service, and accountability, helping governments operate more efficiently and transparently on behalf of the communities they serve.
What makes SOVRA unique is our deep focus on the public sector. Our solutions are purpose-built to solve real, complex procurement challenges, balancing compliance with usability and innovation. That commitment has been recognized with the Achievement of Excellence in Procurement (AEP) Certification from the National Procurement Institute, reflecting our high standards and impact on the market.
At SOVRA, the work you do matters. Every improvement we make helps public organizations stretch taxpayer dollars further, operate with greater transparency, and deliver better outcomes for millions of people. We're a growing, mission-driven company where smart, curious people come together to build technology that serves the public good.
Learn more at sovra.com http://sovra.com.
About the job
This role will build a continuous research practice across the company's buyer products as it develops an AI-native platform. The person in this role makes sure product and design decisions begin with the people who run public procurement: buyers, evaluators and contract managers, and the suppliers who compete for the work.
The role combines practice-building with hands-on research. It sets how research is done at SOVRA, from methods and participant recruitment to a searchable insight library, and it delivers generative and evaluative studies directly, including research on accessibility and on how users check and correct AI features.
The work reaches Product, Design, Customer Experience and the Data team, and informs roadmap decisions across the SOVRA product suite. Public sector audiences expect a high standard of accuracy, so every insight stays traceable to what participants actually said and did.
What will your main responsibilities look like?
Research Strategy & Delivery
- You plan a quarterly research agenda with product leaders, tied to the roadmap decisions that matter most across the suite.
- You establish the protocols, templates, consent processes and participant recruitment that let research run consistently, along with a searchable insight library product teams rely on.
- You lead generative and evaluative studies, including contextual inquiry, interviews, journey mapping, usability testing and surveys, across complex procurement workflows.
- You partner with the Data team to combine behavioral data with what customers tell us, defining success measures that inform product direction.
Continuous Customer Contact
- You keep a steady cadence of contact with agency buyers and suppliers through design partners, customer groups and community sessions.
- You travel within North America, roughly 20% of the time, for agency site visits, contextual inquiry, user groups, planning sessions and one or two industry events a year.
Research Influence
- You bring evidence to roadmap, design and executive conversations, and facilitate workshops and co-design sessions that turn findings into decisions.
- You coach product managers, designers and researchers to plan and run sound research on their own.
Accessibility
- You make research accessible by default to include people with disabilities and assistive-technology users in research, and help teams design to WCAG 2.2 AA and ADA.
AI
- You study how buyers trust, check and correct AI features, and help decide where a person stays in control.
- You use AI to speed up synthesis, tagging and analysis…