Director of Research Operations

Who we’re looking for

Role: Director of Research Operations

Team: Research

Reports To: CTO and Co-Founder

Term: Contract to hire. We are open to full time, permanent for the right candidate

Supervisory Responsibility: This role will have 2 direct reports, the Lead Survey Programmer and the Fielding and Partnerships Team lead. Both are India based.  

This leadership role will be responsible for overseeing the Knit research operations, programming, quality assurance (QA), and fieldwork teams. Total of 10 people, all offshore 

Location: USA, NYC preferred.

Travel: If not located in NYC, this role will be expected to travel to NYC approximately once a month.

A little about us

Knit is the The Researcher-Driven AI Platform helping researchers run agency-quality quant + qual research at DIY costs & speed. Through Knit, brands like NASCAR, JBL, and Mars automate their consumer research process to get a quicker and more holistic understanding of their audiences.

Role Purpose 

The Director of Research Operations is core to Knit’s success by overseeing and optimizing the research operations workflow to deliver consistent, high-quality data. 

By leading the programming, fieldwork, vendor management and QA functions, this role is expected to:

• Help entirely automate survey programming without errors
• Minimize fieldwork time while maximizing audience reach and data quality
• Minimize QA time while upholding our high data quality standards
• Automate feasibility request workflows and increase accuracy of predictions

This leadership role is expected to contribute to product innovation, automation through AI tooling, and adoption of new tools and processes in the project lifecycle, to improve how Knit executes research. 

Business Impact 

The Research Operations function is a primary contributor to Knit’s shared business objectives of:

• Customer retention and upsells (Net Revenue Retention) through increasing speed and quality of research operations.
• Increased win rate on new business through increased audience reach
• Improve gross margins by optimizing sample and headcount spend as revenue scales.

Key Responsibilities

• Leading Programming, Fieldwork, and QA teams to collaborate in setting, meeting, and improving Knit’s data collection SLA’s to meet customer demands and turn it into a competitive advantage. 
• Reducing the average time to final N (become the fastest possible in the industry)
• Improve data quality (highest quality responses in the industry) 
• Improve feasibility (expand audience network to support niche use cases, different sampling techniques, etc.)
  
  
• Providing an expert point of view to enable Product to build automation systems to improve efficiency. Collaborating with product teams to create tooling that automates human processes for programming, fieldwork, feasibility, and data QA.
  
  

Increasing net new capabilities to drive New Business Opportunities: 

• Collaborating across the organization to successfully operationalize new research Knit can support - new capabilities, use cases, and audiences

For example:Expanding international capabilities by driving the initiative from scoping (what is required by the customer in this market) to implementation (compliance, new languages, market-specific needs).Providing operational/executional support for advanced analytic techniques as it impacts Programming, Fielding, and QA

• Serving as the Research Operations Function Leader
• Own company-level objectives, key results, and KPI’s - specifically for improving the strategy for execution, delivery and reporting
• Driving people operations decisions for the Research Operations Function (process mapping, organizational design, capacity management, staff forecasting, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance management, conflict resolution, and morale building)

Required Skills & Experiences

• 7+ years in the insights and market research industry - our ideal candidate has worked in a market research tech agency, leading research operations 
• Proven track record of having built and scaled complex sampling operations for multiple research methodologies (quick-turn, quant & qual).
• Proclivity for automation and productization, a leader who has innovated and built efficiencies into processes that otherwise would not exist 
• Our ideal candidate has cross-functional experience leading and enabling both internal and external teams on research ops processes from idea to full implementation. For example, pricing & feasibility with Sales, positioning with Marketing, compliance with Operations, innovation with Product, etc. We are not looking for a participant in the process - we are looking for a leader who has been in the driver role standing up net new organizational-wide capabilities from scratch. 
• Highly effective people operations leader both cross-functionally and at the function level - specifically in: 
• Adapting processes as the operating tooling evolves 
• Process mapping, organizational design, capacity management, staff forecasting, recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance management, conflict resolution, and morale building
• Deep experience with survey programming across tools like Qualtrics, Decipher, etc.