Deputy Director of Design Research

Job not on LinkedIn

🔥 12 hours ago

🦁 Africa – Remote

💵 $48.5k - $72.1k / year

⏰ Full Time

🔴 Lead

👔 Director

👻 Ghost score 0%

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YLabs

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

11 - 50 employees

💼 Consulting

🍽️ Food & Beverage

📣 Marketing

Consulting • Food & Beverage • Marketing

YLabs is a leading global design and research organization focused on amplifying youth power, agency, and opportunity. Founded in 2016 at the Harvard Innovation Lab, YLabs operates in Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Central America, crafting solutions to address critical challenges related to young people's health and wellbeing, climate resilience, and economic opportunities. The team comprises physicians, designers, economists, developers, public health professionals, and educators, leveraging a human-centered design approach combined with adolescent health expertise to tackle global issues affecting youth.

📋 Description

• Lead YLabs’ Deep Listening function and shape the organization-wide vision, methodology, and operational approach to user and ethnographic field research • Lead projects from research ideation and ground-level field execution through insight synthesis and strategic presentations for C-suite executives and senior stakeholders • Establish institutional systems and develop frameworks across multiple teams • Manage Institutional Review Board submissions, protocol adaptations, and ethics compliance • Oversee development of research protocols, including literature reviews, sampling strategies, and consent mechanisms • Recruit and oversee local Principal Investigators to navigate regional regulatory frameworks, cultural nuances, and site approvals • Ensure adherence to Human Subjects standards, global safeguarding policies, and data protection protocols • Design and lead rapid-cycle field research sprints using immersive observation, semi-structured one-on-one interviews, and participatory focus group discussions • Build and manage pipelines for recruiting and training local community researchers and youth field listeners • Oversee daily field debriefs, implement reflexivity and positionality checks, and mitigate researcher bias • Adapt research plans to unexpected field obstacles, security considerations, and shifting group dynamics • Translate qualitative field data into analytical frameworks such as root-cause analyses, ecosystem maps, personas, and user journey maps • Co-create insight narratives through participatory sense-making with field teams and community partners • Package findings into executive summaries, strategic reports, and presentations for donors, C-suite executives, and senior leaders • Translate youth-driven insights into actionable opportunity areas and strategic recommendations

🎯 Requirements

• Minimum of 7 years of professional experience in design research, user research, qualitative field research, or ethnographic research • Demonstrated track record of leading end-to-end design research initiatives, from field immersion and protocol design to executive-level presentation • Proven experience preparing and managing IRB applications and working directly with local PIs, ethics committees, or research approval boards • Experience building research systems, toolkits, or operational frameworks used across multiple teams or departments • Substantial experience supervising, training, and mentoring researchers and cross-functional project staff • Exceptional verbal, written, and visual communication skills • Portfolio showcasing complex research synthesis translated into clear, actionable frameworks • Willingness and ability to travel up to 50% of the time to field sites across Sub-Saharan Africa • Proficiency with collaborative research synthesis tools, including Miro, Mural, Figma, Dedoose, and NVivo • Candidates must be within the GMT+0 to GMT+4 time zone on the African continent • Master’s or PhD in Anthropology, Design Research, Human-Centered Design, Sociology, UX Research, or a related field (nice to have) • Experience living and working in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly East Africa (nice to have) • Experience working with vulnerable or marginalized youth populations (nice to have) • Satisfactory background check and criminal record clearances required as a condition of employment

🏖️ Benefits

• Full-time salary paid in the local currency of the staff member’s permanent work location • Possibility of contract extension after the initial 12-month term • Confidential handling of application information according to EEO guidelines