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Salary: USD 176,000 - 220,000 / annual
Suno is building the world's first creative entertainment platform powered by AI music generation. The company is the fastest-growing consumer entertainment company and leader in AI music, backed by top-tier investors including Bond Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, IVP, and NVIDIA Ventures.
You will own the foundational research agenda for Suno's mobile create experience, partnering closely with the PM and designer leading that product area. Your focus is understanding the people who haven't yet engaged with music creation—those opening the app with no prior knowledge or vocabulary for what's possible. You'll investigate how creative confidence builds across a very wide range of ages and experience levels, from early childhood through adults.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define and run generative research studies (ethnography, diary studies, longitudinal research, in-context observation, concept work) that shape product direction. You decide what's worth studying and say no to what won't change decisions.
- Design and moderate research with participants across a wide age range, including early childhood and early elementary ages, using developmentally appropriate methods for pre-readers and early readers. Set standards for participant care, guardian consent, and assent.
- Lead in-person and in-field research, including in-home sessions and multi-participant settings (households, families). You recognize that critical behavior emerges in these contexts, not in remote tests.
- Sit alongside the mobile create PM, designer, and engineers as decisions are made. Bring user signal early enough to shape work, not late enough to only validate it.
- Create durable research outputs—segmentations, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done frameworks, design principles—that outlive individual launches and get cited across the organization.
- Connect qualitative findings to quantitative data. Work with data science as a peer to size insights and with growth partners to translate findings into acquisition, onboarding, and retention bets.
- Mentor other researchers, review study designs, and raise the craft bar across the research function. This is an individual contributor role with real influence, not a management track.
This is a senior IC role. You will not be handed a research roadmap; you'll build one, argue for it, and change your mind in public when data says you were wrong.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of industry UX research experience with deep specialization in qualitative methods and consumer mobile products
- Track record of research that shifted strategy (not just UI). You can name the roadmap decisions, product bets, or reversals your work drove
- Experience designing and moderating research with participants across a very wide age range, including early childhood and early elementary ages, using developmentally appropriate methods for pre-readers and early readers
- Experience running in-person research with families, including in-home and in-context sessions, multi-participant sessions, and the consent/assent workflows that come with them
- Rigorous methodological judgment and the range to match method to question rather than reaching for the same study every time
- Sound instincts about ethics and participant comfort with people who are not professional research subjects
- Fluency with quantitative data. You can read experiment readouts, design surveys that hold up, and hold your own with data scientists
- Genuinely self-directed. You find important questions before anyone assigns them, with high tolerance for ambiguity, shifting priorities, and moving faster than feels comfortable
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders without authority and hold a position when the room disagrees
- Excitement about consumer products, creativity, music, and AI, and the idea that interaction patterns for this category don't exist yet
Preferred qualifications:
- PhD in HCI, Human-Centered Computing, Psychology, Learning Sciences, or related field, combined with real industry experience
- Startup experience, especially as first/only researcher or as a founder
- Experience in sensitive or high-scrutiny product areas (safety, trust, wellbeing)
- Background in consumer mobile in audio, music, or social
- Experience researching AI and generative products where user mental models are still forming
- Knowledge of a good UX research lab or in-person session space in LA
- Bonus: have used Suno to make music
Must be authorized to work in the United States and willing to work 5 days per week at the Venice Beach office. Some travel for offsites and field research.
