Senior UX Researcher - AI

About the role

We’re a confidential (NDA), AI‑first team inside Tesco, operating with startup urgency to create new sources of customer growth. This is a 0→1 environment—expect end‑to‑end ownership, rapid experimentation, and fast shipping. We lean in wherever the work takes us, beyond traditional role boundaries.
As a UX Researcher, you will play a critical role in shaping product direction through evidence‑based insight. You’ll design and deliver research that explains why customers behave the way they do, ensuring our experiences are grounded in real needs and validated in the wild. Working closely with Product, Engineering, and Data, you’ll use AI and modern research tools to accelerate learning and drive impact.We’re looking for someone who thrives in a startup mindset:

• Bias to action: move quickly from insight to experiment to live learning
• Scrappy and resourceful: progress over perfection, using tools at hand
• Customer‑obsessed: decisions anchored in real customer insight
• Ownership: accountable for outcomes, not just outputs
• Transparent communicator: share insight early and often
• AI‑forward: leverage AI to accelerate research, synthesis, and storytelling

What is in it for you We’re all about the little helps. That’s why we make sure our Tesco colleague benefits package takes care of you – both in and out of work. Click Here to find out more!

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus Bank holidays).
• Private medical insurance.
• 26 weeks maternity and adoption leave (12 months service required at the qualifying date) at full pay, followed by 13 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay or Statutory Adoption Pay, we also offer 6 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Free 24/7 virtual GP service, Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for you and your family, free access to a range of experts to support your mental wellbeing.
• This information is a shortened summary, refer to our policies for full details.

You will be responsible for

• Shaping product strategy by validating or challenging the roadmap and identifying the biggest opportunities through robust research
• Owning qualitative and mixed‑methods research, uncovering the “why” behind customer behaviour and translating it into actionable insight
• Ensuring customer‑centred delivery by testing concepts and live experiences, surfacing pain points, and championing user needs across the team
• Driving continuous optimisation by interpreting live‑product feedback and advising where iteration delivers more value than net‑new features
• Influencing prioritisation by ensuring the backlog focuses on what matters most to customers and the business
• Supporting discovery for future opportunities by defining what must be true across customer behaviour, technical enablers, and organisational capability
• Partnering cross‑functionally with Product, Engineering, and Data (including Analysts to triangulate insights) to drive confident, evidence‑based decisions

You will need

• Strong experience in UX research, spanning qualitative and mixed‑methods approaches, with a track record of influencing product decisions
• Ability to translate ambiguous problems into clear research questions, and insights into tangible product opportunities
• Experience working in fast‑paced, experimental environments, ideally shipping and iterating on live digital products
• Confidence in using data and research together—partnering with analytics to triangulate and strengthen insight
• Strong communication and storytelling skills, able to bring stakeholders on the journey and influence senior decisions
• A customer‑first mindset, with a passion for deeply understanding needs, behaviours, and pain points
• Comfort working in a high‑ownership, low‑structure environment, where you set direction as well as execute
• Familiarity with AI‑enabled research tools and approaches, using them to accelerate insight generation and synthesis

About us Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer's favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move. Our core purpose is ‘Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day’. Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers. It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of and for the planet. We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves. At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings. We're committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities. We’re proud to have been accredited Disability Confident Leader and we’re committed to providing a fully inclusive and accessible recruitment process. For further information on the accessibility support we can offer, please click here. We’re a big business and we can offer a range of diverse full-time & part-time working patterns across our many business areas, which means that we can find something that works for you. We work in a more blended pattern - combining office and remote working. Our offices will continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate. If you are applying internally, please speak to the Hiring Manager about how this can work for you - Everyone is welcome at Tesco.