UX Researcher — Growth

Tailscale is looking for a UX Researcher to investigate one of the most commercially important parts of the user experience: how people discover, try, understand and ultimately adopt a product.

This is a dedicated Growth Research position where you'll work closely with Product Growth to uncover friction across onboarding, acquisition and activation.

Rather than focusing primarily on generative research for entirely new products, you'll investigate existing experiences and help the team understand what prevents users from reaching value — and what could make adoption easier.

The position is remote and offers a US base salary of $146,000–$183,000.

Research built around real growth questions

You'll work directly with Growth Product Managers and Growth Designers, turning hypotheses from the team's experimentation pipeline into structured research.

One week that could mean testing whether users understand an onboarding experience.

Another could involve designing a survey, analyzing behavioral data or investigating why people abandon a particular stage of the adoption journey.

You'll own studies from beginning to end, including:

• Defining research questions and study scope.
• Recruiting participants.
• Running moderated and unmoderated usability studies.
• Designing surveys and feedback mechanisms.
• Conducting interviews.
• Running experimental research.
• Using longitudinal methods such as diary studies.
• Analyzing results.
• Communicating findings to Product, Design and Engineering.
• Turning research insights into potential experiments and design ideas.

The objective isn't simply to produce research reports. Your findings should help the Growth team decide what to test or change next.

This role combines qualitative and quantitative UX research

Tailscale is particularly interested in researchers who can move comfortably between different kinds of evidence.

You'll conduct interviews and usability tests, but you'll also work with experiments, surveys, behavioral logs and quantitative analysis.

You'll use product data to validate hypotheses and combine it with findings from research studies to develop a more complete picture of user behavior.

That could mean investigating whether something observed during usability testing also appears in behavioral data — or using quantitative evidence to identify a problem that deserves deeper qualitative investigation.

Want to strengthen the quantitative side of your design decisions?

Designlab's Data-Driven Design course is designed for UX and Product professionals who want to become more confident using data to inform product decisions.

It explores how quantitative and qualitative evidence can be used together to understand user behavior, evaluate product experiences and make stronger design decisions.

For researchers and designers seeing more roles combine user research, behavioral data, experimentation and product metrics, it's a particularly relevant skill set to develop.

Explore Data-Driven Design (Affiliate link)

Understand how users become customers

Your research will concentrate heavily on the adoption lifecycle.

You'll investigate how users:

• Discover Tailscale.
• Begin a trial.
• Evaluate the product.
• Complete proof-of-concept work.
• Move through onboarding.
• Reach activation.
• Encounter friction.
• Adopt the product into their workflows.

You'll also help map adoption behaviors and develop personas based on the patterns you uncover.

Beyond direct research studies, Tailscale expects you to proactively look for signals elsewhere — including community discussions, feedback forms and behavioral data — that might reveal new research opportunities.

Over time, the scope could expand into revenue-related areas such as pricing, packaging, billing and SKU research.

Research that moves at the speed of experimentation

Growth teams don't always have weeks to wait for an exhaustive research project.

You'll work alongside an active experimentation and A/B testing cadence, which means knowing when a fast, pragmatic study provides enough evidence — and when a question requires greater methodological rigor.

Tailscale wants someone comfortable communicating frequently while research is still happening rather than disappearing for weeks and returning with a finished presentation.

You'll involve Growth PMs and Designers in the research process and bring findings back in formats that can be acted upon quickly.

What Tailscale is looking for

You'll need at least 5 years of UX Research or related applied research experience.

Strong quantitative research capabilities are particularly important.

Tailscale is looking for experience with:

• Survey design.
• Experimental research.
• Statistical analysis.
• Inferential statistics.
• Moderated usability testing.
• Unmoderated usability testing.
• Mixed-methods research.
• Behavioral data analysis.
• Research recruitment and logistics.
• Communicating findings to Product and Engineering teams.

You should also have experience working within a SaaS or B2B product environment.

A behavioral science background could translate particularly well

Experience in areas such as Human Factors, Behavioral Psychology or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) could be especially useful.

This position may also suit you if you've previously worked on:

• Product-led growth.
• Acquisition research.
• Activation.
• Enterprise SaaS.
• Technical products.
• Advanced quantitative UX research.
• Experimentation programs.
• A/B testing.

Interestingly, Tailscale isn't looking for someone who needs immediate ownership of company-wide research strategy.

The role is positioned for an early-to-mid-career researcher who still enjoys hands-on research craft and wants to develop greater ownership over time.

Grow from individual studies to owning the research agenda

Your first six months will focus heavily on understanding Tailscale itself: the product, its growth model, what users have already been telling the company and which experiments the team has already run.

Initially, you'll execute studies emerging from the Growth team's existing pipeline.

As your domain knowledge develops, Tailscale expects you to become increasingly independent — identifying research opportunities yourself and eventually helping define the research program for growth-related areas.

You'll report to the Design Manager, while a Staff UX Researcher will provide methodological and broader research support.

Salary and benefits

Tailscale lists a US base salary range of:

$146,000–$183,000 USD

The broader compensation package includes equity alongside benefits.

Employees can also receive:

• Health, dental and vision coverage.
• Employer-funded retirement contributions.
• Flexible paid time off.
• $1,500 annually for professional development.
• Mentorship and coaching opportunities.
• Paid parental leave.
• Monthly home internet reimbursement.
• A company-owned Mac or PC.
• $500 toward a customized home-office setup.
• Access to coworking spaces.
• Company retreats and team off-sites.

Tailscale operates as a remote-first organization with distributed teams.

Research the moments that determine whether a product grows

This isn't a UX Research role where success ends with understanding the user.

You'll need to connect that understanding to product behavior and business outcomes.

Why didn't someone activate? Where did they hesitate? What did they misunderstand? Does the behavioral data support what users told us? Which change should the Growth team test next?

For a UX Researcher who enjoys combining human behavior, experimentation, quantitative evidence and product strategy, Tailscale offers an opportunity to work directly on the research questions that determine how a product grows.