User Design Specialist

Team: Office of the CEO (Greenhouse)

Location: This is a fully remote role.

Role Type:

• This is a part-time position - 20 hours per week
• This is a temp position expected to last 3-6 months from the start date
  
  

About The Team

Greenhouse is an innovation lab focused on designing, testing, and scaling bold solutions for students and educators. As we begin the 125th year, we renew our efforts to partner with education leaders and our 6,000 members to make progress against the sector's most pressing issues. Greenhouse marks this major commitment: We will invest a substantial part of our financial reserve to drive significant change and impact in the face of education's biggest problems.

About The Opportunity

You will serve as a strategic partner across four Greenhouse project teams working on discrete challenges in education and emerging technology. Your primary focus will be to lead recruitment, advise on best-in-class strategies, and enable high-quality, inclusive research execution.

As our specialist, you will support all our research practices: executing participant recruitment, informed consent, screening, scheduling, and incentives. This role requires creative problem solving and strategic judgment to ethically recruit participants across the student journey—from early childhood to post-secondary education. You will help shape what excellent research operations look like in a mission-driven, experimental context, contributing to the broader culture of evidence-informed design.

Apart from direct support to teams, this role includes laying the groundwork for building scalable, inclusive, collaborative, and ethical research across Greenhouse's diverse innovation portfolio. You will be responsible for developing lightweight, fit-for-purpose processes for participant recruitment, research planning, knowledge management, and tooling.

In this role, you will:

• Own End-to-End Recruitment for Research
• Lead participant recruitment for a variety of research methods (e.g., interviews, co-design, surveys, usability testing), including screening, informed consent, scheduling, and incentives
• Draft accessible, plain-language consent and communication materials in collaboration with legal and compliance teams
• Craft effective screeners and other materials to ensure inclusive and successful sessions
• Conduct initial screening conversations to ensure individuals are appropriately prepared, informed, and confident in participating in innovative research methods
• Support and Advise Researchers
• Act as a thought partner to user researchers and service designers, providing guidance on recruitment, logistics, study design, and resource planning
• Develop and implement inclusive recruitment strategies, especially for underrepresented populations and beyond traditional pathways
• Advise on recruitment and research practices that balance student privacy and allow for longer-term engagement with communities
• Streamline and Standardize Research Ops
• Identify and implement lightweight, scalable processes that support inclusive, ethical, collaborative, and innovative research across Greenhouse teams.
• Identify gaps or friction in existing research workflows and recommend improvements
• Establish toolkits, templates, and repeatable processes for recruitment, planning, and data handling
• Advise on and implement privacy, consent, and data protection procedures aligned with legal standards (e.g., FERPA)
• Client the Groundwork for Long-Term Research Infrastructure
• Evaluate research tools and vendor platforms (e.g., scheduling, transcription, incentives) and recommend fit-for-purpose solutions
• Recommend and document sustainable practices that support equitable research at scale
• Co-design an early iteration of a research repository with Greenhouse designers, including recommended tooling and strategies for scaling and improving
  
  

About You

• 5 years of experience in research operations, UX research, or related program management roles
• Experience in research enablement — creating documentation, templates, and leading internal workshops around best practices
• Established experience across the research lifecycle, which includes recruiting participants, managing a participant panel, and training teams on how to match participants to studies
• Experience supporting qualitative and quantitative research methods across multiple teams with distinct products and user needs
• Experience supporting data collection and analysis: taking notes on qualitative studies, preparing data for analysis
• Experience working with tools such as Airtable, Dovetail, Qualtrics, UserTesting, Dscout, or similar a plus. Support working within their limitations or drive decisions on best tools to meet teams' needs
• Strong project management and systems design skills; ability to build processes that scale
• Excellent organizational, collaboration, and communication skills
• A creative, proactive, entrepreneurial mindset—comfortable bringing new ideas and strategies to improve our research practice
• Deep respect for ethical research practices and user data privacy
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment with shifting priorities
  
  

Nice to have:

• Experience working in or with mission-driven organizations, public education, or nonprofits
• Experience supporting research involving youth, families, or vulnerable populations
• Experience creating inclusive research frameworks and protocols
• Experience with or demonstrated interest in creative visual storytelling that brings research to life
  
  

All roles at require:

• A passion for expanding educational and career opportunities and mission-driven work
• Curiosity and enthusiasm for emerging technologies, with a willingness to experiment with and adopt new AI-driven solutions and comfort with learning and applying new digital tools independently and proactively.
• Clear and concise communication skills, written and verbal
• A learner's mindset and a commitment to growth: welcoming diverse perspectives, giving and receiving timely, respectful feedback, and continuously improving through iterative learning and user input.
• A drive for impact and excellence: solving complex problems, making data-informed decisions, prioritizing what matters most, and continuously improving through learning, user input, and external benchmarking.
• A collaborative and empathetic approach: working across differences, fostering trust, and contributing to a culture of shared success