UX Engineer, Principal

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: UX Engineer, Principal

Company: Blackbaud

Location: Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Job Type: Full time

Category: User Experience Research & Design

Date Posted: 2026-07-27

Experience Level: Principal (10+ years)

Remote Status: On-site

🚀 Role Summary

• Lead strategic user research initiatives to deeply understand diverse user segments and their evolving needs within AI-mediated environments, driving product strategy and innovation.

• Conduct advanced qualitative and quantitative research, adapting methodologies to tackle complex, long-term questions related to human-AI interaction and trust.

• Mentor and guide junior researchers and designers, fostering a culture of research excellence and contributing to systematic improvements in research quality and impact.

• Partner with UX leadership, product managers, designers, and engineers to translate research insights into actionable product decisions and strategic direction for key initiatives.

• Explore and leverage AI-assisted tools to enhance research efficiency, quality, and delivery, while also experimenting with emerging AI capabilities.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role is positioned as a Principal level, indicating a significant need for strategic leadership, mentorship, and the ability to drive research direction independently. The emphasis on AI and human-AI interaction suggests a forward-thinking approach to UX research, focusing on the nuanced challenges of current and future technology. The "UX Engineer" title is unconventional for a pure research role; it implies a strong technical understanding and perhaps a role that bridges research findings with technical implementation considerations, or it may be a legacy title for a senior research position. Given the description, it's primarily a Principal UX Researcher role with a strong AI focus.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Identify and prioritize strategic research opportunities within specific product capabilities or solution areas, aligning research efforts with business objectives and user needs.

• Design and execute sophisticated research plans that integrate generative and evaluative, qualitative and quantitative methods to address complex, multi-faceted user challenges and longer-term product vision.

• Specialize in researching human-AI interactions, focusing on user interpretation, trust, calibration of reliance, and recovery from AI outputs, including aspects of transparency, explainability, and error tolerance.

• Develop and present compelling, insight-driven narratives tailored to various stakeholders (UX leadership, product teams, engineering, executives) to influence product strategy and design decisions.

• Champion the responsible use of AI in research and product development, considering ethical implications such as bias, fairness, and user autonomy.

• Facilitate research-informed workshops and ideation sessions to foster cross-functional understanding and drive innovative solutions based on user insights.

• Proactively identify and implement process improvements for the user research practice, enhancing efficiency, quality, and the overall impact of research activities across the organization.

• Mentor and coach other researchers and designers, sharing expertise in advanced research techniques and fostering their professional growth within the UX discipline.

📝 Enhancement Note: The responsibilities highlight a strategic and leadership-oriented role. The emphasis on adapting methods and researching complex, long-term questions points to a need for innovation in research design. The specific focus on AI behaviors and human-AI interaction is a critical differentiator for this role, requiring a deep understanding of how users perceive and interact with probabilistic systems.

🎓 Skills & Qualifications

Education:

• A Master's or Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, or a related field is highly preferred, demonstrating a strong theoretical and methodological foundation relevant to user research and AI. Experience:

• 10+ years of progressive experience in user research, with a significant portion dedicated to leading strategic research initiatives within product development cycles.

• Demonstrated experience in driving research within a specific product capability or solution area, showing ownership and strategic impact.

• Proven ability to partner effectively with cross-functional teams including Product Management, Design, Engineering, and Data Science/Analytics. Required Skills:

• Mastery of a wide range of qualitative research methodologies (e.g., in-depth interviews, ethnography, usability testing, diary studies, contextual inquiry).

• Fluency in quantitative research methods and inferential statistics, with the ability to design experiments, analyze data, and draw statistically sound conclusions.

• Expertise in researching human-AI interaction, including understanding user perceptions of AI, trust, explainability, and bias.

• Strong strategic thinking and problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify research opportunities and define research questions that address complex business and user challenges.

• Exceptional communication, storytelling, and presentation skills, with a proven ability to articulate complex insights clearly and persuasively to diverse audiences.

• Experience in mentoring junior researchers or designers, fostering their development and improving team-wide research capabilities. Preferred Skills:

• Experience with AI-assisted research tools and a proactive approach to experimenting with new technologies for research acceleration and quality improvement.

• Familiarity with responsible AI principles, ethical considerations, and methods for studying AI bias, transparency, and fairness.

• Experience researching AI in enterprise software or complex domain environments.

• A portfolio showcasing end-to-end research projects with demonstrable impact on product design and strategy, including case studies involving AI or intelligent systems.

• Fluency in statistical analysis software (e.g., R, SPSS, Python libraries) and data visualization tools.

📝 Enhancement Note: The "UX Engineer" title, while unusual for a research role, suggests that candidates with a strong technical aptitude, perhaps some coding knowledge or a deep understanding of system design, might be particularly well-suited. The emphasis on inferential statistics and quantitative methods, combined with qualitative mastery, points to a need for a highly analytical and data-driven researcher capable of complex problem-solving.

📊 Process & Systems Portfolio Requirements

Portfolio Essentials:

• Demonstrate a strong command of research methodologies by showcasing end-to-end research projects from problem definition to actionable insights and impact.

• Include case studies that highlight strategic research contributions, illustrating how research insights directly influenced product strategy, design decisions, or business outcomes.

• Present examples of research conducted on AI or intelligent systems, detailing the specific challenges encountered and the