Manager/Senior Manager: Consumer Insights (AI-First)

About the Role:

Urban Company is at the scale where every category decision - a pricing change, a new SKU or a change to the consumer journey moves meaningful NTV. Sharp research is our muscle that sets those decisions up for success. And the industry itself is being rewritten: consumer studies that took weeks now take days with AI moderators and synthesis; pricing studies that needed 400 CATI interviews can be run end-to-end with AI calling. We are looking for a Manager/Senior Manager - Research who can do two things at once. One, run the research engine across category research as an independent operator. Two, reimagine how that engine works in an AI-first world - building the tooling, ops automation and operating model that lets a lean research function punch far above its weight. This is a solo IC role today. There is no layer between you and agencies or the category & business leaders. You will own and scale the practice.

What you'll own:

Consumer research: Usage & attitude studies, customer journey mapping, agile qual + quant studies that inform real-time service, ops and category decisions across UC's range of services & products (InstaHelp, Native, Beauty, Cleaning, AC, Revamp and more).

Brand & funnel research: Brand health tracking, funnel drop-off insights. The go-to research partner for brand and marketing.

Category & market research: Market/occasion sizing, competitive intelligence, pricing studies, new SKU/category validation. The person category leaders pull in when they need an evidence base for a bet.

UC's AI-first research practice: Build the infrastructure, tooling and ways of working that let UC operate research at 5x the speed and scale of an industry-standard setup. Concretely:

- AI-led primary research: qual + quant consumer insights via AI moderation (already in practice), pricing studies via AI calling + synthesis.

- Research ops automation: auto-generated discussion guides from study objectives, automated data cleaning and quality flags, sample size recommendations driven by hypothesis/objectives/answers needed.

- Internal AI tooling: Custom GPTs / agentic workflows that synthesize multiple data inputs (e.g. consumer support tickets, NPS data, app/playstore reviews) to put structured research self-service in the hands of category and brand teams.

How you'll operate:

You will own the agency ecosystem end-to-end: scoping, briefing, costing, QA, insights to final business recommendations. You will sit close to marketing & business leaders, translate fuzzy questions into sharp research questions, and come back with actionable, evidence-based business recommendations, not just findings or insights.

What we're looking for:

Must-haves:

- Experience: 5-8 years of research experience (consumer / brand / market) at a research agency, strategy consultancy, or in-house at a consumer or internet company. Level (Manager vs Sr Manager) will be calibrated to the candidate.

- Foundational craft: strong in qual and quant methodologies, sample design, questionnaire design, statistical literacy. You know a leading question or a biased sample from a mile away.

- Demonstrably independent: Have run multi-stakeholder research programs end-to-end with minimal oversight: owned the agency relationship, not just attended the presentation.

- Comfortable presenting to senior business stakeholders and pushing back when the data says one thing and institutional intuition says another.

- Genuine, hands-on enthusiasm for AI in research: Have built with AI tools vs. having read about them/used AI in an ad-hoc fashion. You bring a point of view on where AI replaces, augments, or fails in research.

- Owners mindset: Comfortable shipping/iterating in the open & collaborating with teams.

Good to have:

- Experience in a consumer internet, services or D2C business.

- Familiarity with the India research partner landscape (quant + qual) and the ability to manage the entire relationship end to end.

Why take this role:

- Greenfield AI-first mandate: Most research jobs in India are still wired around 2018 ways of working. This one explicitly isn't.

- High autonomy & ownership: You'll have ownership & visibility that typically comes two levels up.

- Scale & breadth of problem statements: UC runs millions of services a year across India and international markets. The decisions your research informs are consequential.