Senior Manager, AI Research, User Success

Position Overview 

In Autodesk AEC Construction, our mission is to help teams meet the world’s rapidly expanding building and infrastructure needs while making construction more predictable, safe, and sustainable. Reporting to the Director, AEC, AI Research, User Success, the Senior Manager, AI Research, User Success leads the user research strategy for Autodesk’s next generation of AI-powered product experiences. This role is focused on ensuring that AI capabilities are grounded in deep understanding of user needs, behaviors, and real-world workflows—and that this understanding consistently informs product decisions and outcomes. 

A core responsibility of this role is to ensure that all user research efforts related to AI are coordinated, connected, and mutually reinforcing. As AI initiatives scale across the organization, there is a risk of fragmented insights and disconnected experiences. This role brings together user research across teams and domains into a cohesive, outcome-oriented research agenda that drives clear differentiation and meaningful user value. This role is distinct from R&D-focused AI research. While R&D teams explore models, algorithms, and technical capabilities, this role ensures those capabilities translate into useful, usable, and valuable experiences for users. The Senior Manager will work in close partnership with R&D to connect technical innovation with real user needs, ensuring alignment between what is possible and what is meaningful. 

A key part of this role is enabling the creation of AI experiences that help users flourish—enhancing their capability, confidence, and outcomes in real workflows. This includes both informing the design of these experiences through user research and establishing ways to measure their real-world impact, ensuring AI delivers tangible value in practice. This leader manages a team of approximately 6 AI-focused user researchers, setting direction, elevating craft, and ensuring work is aligned, scalable, and impactful. Success in this role means establishing a unified, high-quality user research system that drives better AI decisions, accelerates innovation, and ensures our AI experiences deliver meaningful, measurable value to users. 

Location: preference for candidates in Toronto, Canada. Open to candidates across Canada and other locations in the United States.

Travel: estimated at quarterly across North America.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the research strategy for AI-powered experiences, aligning to product priorities and business outcomes 

• Embed research into product development cycles, directly influencing roadmap decisions and prioritization 

• Establish a unified approach that connects qualitative insight, behavioral data, and AI performance signals 

• Apply Critical User Journeys (CUJs) to identify and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across workflows 

• Ensure AI capabilities are designed as coherent, end-to-end experiences rather than isolated features 

• Translate journey insights into product direction, guiding cross-product integration and investment decisions 

• Lead validation of AI capabilities within real-world workflows, focusing on usability, effectiveness, and task success 

• Define and measure user trust, adoption, and experience quality 

• Drive continuous optimization through experimentation, feedback loops, and mixed-method research 

• Lead adoption of AI-enabled research methods, including automated synthesis, AI-assisted interviewing, and real-time insight generation 

• Build scalable systems that continuously learn from user interaction with AI-powered features 

• Experiment with emerging approaches to increase the speed, scale, and impact of research 

• Lead and develop a team of ~6 AI-focused researchers, setting direction and ensuring high-impact delivery 

• Coordinate research across initiatives, establishing shared methods, standards, and priorities 

• Translate insights into clear, influential narratives that drive executive alignment and product decisions 

Minimum Qualifications 

• 12+ years of experience in user research, including leadership of research for complex, technology-driven products 

• Proven experience managing and developing research teams, with a track record of scaling impact through others 

• Experience defining and executing research strategy across multiple teams or product areas 

• Experience working on AI/ML-driven products, with strong understanding of user experience challenges in AI systems 

• Demonstrated experience applying journey-based or systems-level thinking (e.g., service design, journey management, end-to-end workflows) 

• Strong experience integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods to drive product decisions 

• Experience working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Design in complex environments 

• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders 

• Experience applying AI in research workflows or strong demonstrated interest in AI-enabled research practices