Senior User Researcher – AI

Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior User Researcher to lead research activities for a Generative AI platform for a UK government department. This role focuses on understanding how internal government users work today, how they perceive and trust AI-assisted outputs, and how the platform can be designed to support safe, effective, human-in-the-loop decision-making — while meeting GOV.

UK Service Standard expectations for user research.

Key Responsibilities

Research Strategy & Planning Define and own the user research plan across discovery, alpha, beta, and live phases, ensuring research activities are timed to inform key product and design decisions rather than validate them after the fact. Understanding Trust & AI Interaction Conduct research to understand how internal government users interpret, trust, and act on AI-generated answers, retrieval sources, and confidence indicators, surfacing risks around over-reliance, misunderstanding, or mistrust of AI outputs.

Research Execution Plan and conduct a range of research activities — including interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, and diary studies — with civil servants and other internal government users, recruiting participants in line with government research standards and data handling policies. Human-in-the-Loop Validation Test and validate that human-in-the-loop checkpoints and escalation flows (as defined by policy/technical leads) are understood and usable by real users — an execution and validation role, not a policy-setting one.

Synthesis & amp; Insight Sharing Synthesise research findings into clear, actionable insights for Product, UX, and Engineering teams, and present findings to senior stakeholders in a way that supports evidence-based decision-making. Service Assessment Support Prepare and present user research evidence for GOV.UK service assessments (Alpha/Beta/Live), ensuring research practices and outputs meet the Service Standard's evidentiary requirements.

Documentation & Handover Contribute research findings, methodologies, and participant insights to "Docs-as-Code" artifacts supporting the OKUA knowledge-transfer framework, so future teams understand the evidence behind design and product decisions. Cross-Functional Collaboration Work closely with UX Designers, Product Managers, and Engineers to ensure research findings directly inform design iterations, evaluation criteria, and roadmap prioritisation.

Required Skills

& Experience ● Demonstrable experience as a User Researcher on complex, digital products, ideally involving data-heavy or AI-assisted systems ● Strong grounding in a range of qualitative (and ideally quantitative) research methods: interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry, surveys ● Experience researching trust, transparency, and comprehension issues in software presenting automated or algorithmic outputs ● Experience recruiting and conducting research with government or otherwise sensitive/regulated user groups, following appropriate ethical and data protection standards ● Practical experience with GOV.

UK Service Standard research expectations and preparing evidence for service assessments ● Strong synthesis and communication skills, able to translate research into clear recommendations for varied audiences (designers, engineers, senior stakeholders) ● Comfortable working within secure, regulated environments and handling sensitive data appropriately Desirable Experience ● Direct experience researching LLM/RAG-based products, chatbots, or other AI- assisted decision-making tools ● Experience delivering digital services within UK central government or the wider public sector ● Experience designing or evaluating human-in-the-loop or escalation workflows ● Familiarity with accessibility research methods and inclusive design principles ● Exposure to research repositories, tooling, or open-source UX research communities