Staff User Researcher

Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions—creating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.

Our Experience-Led, Intelligence-Driven approach combines human-centered design with data, automation, and cloud-based innovation. Built on an API-first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growth—turning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.

Candescent is hiring for a Staff User Researcher, who will set the standard for how research gets done, drive the decisions that matter most to product and business, and help a growing team build the kind of credibility that makes stakeholders come to research before they've already made up their minds.

The Staff User Researcher will work on how research creates value and work at two levels at once - understanding the people who use the product every day so that the financial institutions we serve can make better decisions about what to build, buy, and prioritize.

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

Research Leadership & Strategy

• Define and drive a research agenda across multiple product areas identifying the highest-leverage questions and making a clear case for how research will answer them
• Set research standards and practices for the team: how we design studies, how we ensure rigor, how we communicate findings so they change decisions
• Anticipate what product, design, and leadership will need to know six months from now, and build toward it - not just respond to the queue

Conducting and Commissioning Research

• Lead research on the most complex and strategically important problems - the kind that don't come with a clear method or a clean answer
• Design and execute studies across qualitative and quantitative methods: contextual inquiry, usability testing, longitudinal studies, survey research, journey mapping, concept testing, and more
• Synthesize across bodies of work and connect what we've learned over time into coherent, usable knowledge rather than one-off insight drops
• Primarily focused on understanding end users (the people banking day-to-day), with a sharp eye for how those findings translate into decisions that matter to the financial institutions we serve

Influence & Stakeholder Partnership

• Occasionally engage directly with financial institution clients and partners - presenting research, gathering context, and helping them understand what their customers actually need
• Work closely with client-facing teams to ensure research is positioned in ways that resonate with a B2B audience: framing findings not just in terms of user behavior, but in terms of product strategy, risk, and competitive differentiation
• Build trust with internal stakeholders who are still figuring out what research is for and translate research value into business terms without flattening the nuance

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, UX/UI or related field
• 6+ years of user research experience on digital products - web, mobile, and the complex workflows that sit behind both.
• A demonstrated track record of research that shaped product or business strategy, not just informed it. You've changed what got built, not just documented what users said.
• Expertise across qualitative and quantitative methods, with strong judgment about when to use what and why.
• Experience navigating large, complex organizations with multiple stakeholder types and familiarity with the client-vendor dynamic in enterprise software is a real plus. At Candescent, the financial institution is your client and their customers are your research subjects. Knowing how to hold both is important.
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can scope your own work, identify the right question, and make a credible case for your approach without waiting to be handed a brief. If you've helped build or formalize a research practice from an early stage, you'll hit the ground running here.
• Clear, precise communication across audiences - you know the difference between a finding and an insight, and you can make that distinction matter to a product manager, a designer, and a bank executive, all in the same week.
• Direct experience in fintech, banking, or financial services, especially platforms serving financial institutions, as well as a graduate degree in HCI, cognitive psychology, sociology, information science, or a related field are a strong plus

Statement to Third Party Agencies
To ALL recruitment agencies: Candescent only accepts resumes from agencies on the preferred supplier list. Please do not forward resumes to our applicant tracking system, Candescent employees, or any Candescent facility. Candescent is not responsible for any fees or charges associated with unsolicited resumes.