UX Research & Analytics Lead

About the Role

Surge is an AI-first software and data company serving the wholesale mortgage lending space. We run Partner360, a partner relationship management platform with a ten-year production history and a six-year zero-outage record, built on proprietary mortgage-industry data that nobody else can assemble. We recently entered a new chapter under new ownership, and we are building the team that takes us through our next phase of growth.

This is the seat closest to the voice of the customer. You will lead how we discover what to build, how we measure whether the things we build land, and how we turn observed customer behavior into the next product decision. The seat is deliberately scoped as UX research and analytics: not because we want a generalist who does both at half-depth, but because we believe the work is one job. The person who watches a customer use the product, who interviews their leadership, and who instruments and queries the data to confirm what they saw should be the same person. That is rare, and that is the bar.

What You Will Do

Customer Research

• Run the discovery work behind every major product decision: customer interviews, contextual inquiry, jobs-to-be-done framing
• Build and maintain the research practice that keeps the product team honest about who we are actually building for

Analytics and Measurement

• Instrument the customer-facing surfaces so we can see what customers actually do
• Build the measurement frame that tells us whether a new capability is working
• Co-own decision metrics with the data scientist and the systems architecture engineer. Measurement is not a separate function

Voice-of-Customer to Product

• Translate observed behavior into specific product moves, not slide decks but decisions
• Sit alongside the product team during design and turn ambiguity into testable hypotheses
• Run usability work on the customer-facing surfaces and feed findings back into the model and the interface in the same week

What We Are Looking For

• Seven-plus years across UX research and data and analytics work, or a deep academic background in human-computer interaction, design science, or a closely related field plus applied industry experience
• A track record of running customer research at companies that ship products
• A daily AI tool user, comfortable working with AI as a partner not a curiosity
• Mortgage, fintech, or financial services background a plus; deep B2B SaaS experience
• Comfortable with the full research stack: discovery interviews, contextual inquiry, usability, survey design
• SQL fluency and working analytical proficiency in Python or R
• A visual communicator (Lucid, Figma, Adobe, and the like) whose research artifacts are clear without a presenter

The job touches the same stack the rest of the team works in: Snowflake (event data, dashboards, the analytics layer), Salesforce, Claude Code (daily AI-assisted research and analysis), AWS / S3, and Google Workspace.

Who You Are

• An individual contributor leader who builds the practice through example, not headcount
• An async communicator who documents decisions and context
• Transparent about what was observed versus what was inferred
• Someone who ships findings the team acts on, not reports that sit in a folder

How We Hire

As part of the interview process, you will spend a working session demonstrating how you actually work with AI tools on a real research-and-analytics problem, live, against data we hand you. No pseudocode, no trivia. We are evaluating how you frame discovery, how you triangulate qualitative and quantitative evidence, how you turn observation into a product move, and how fluently you use AI as a collaborator.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive compensation based on experience (including bonus, 401(k), etc.)
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Remote work

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other category protected by law.