UX Research Lead

About Speek Speek Health is on a mission to end the wait for life-changing mental healthcare for young people and their families, by blending AI and clinical science to rethink how mental healthcare is delivered to families.  We need someone whose job is to understand, deeply and continuously, what it actually feels like to use what we make. They need to hear it from a 14-year-old at 11pm, from a dad who doesn't know how to start the conversation, and from a clinician with twenty minutes between appointments. We are a group of high impact mission driven clinicians, technologists and seasoned entrepreneurs, who have first hand experience, both professional and personal, of caring for a loved one struggling with their mental health.  Together, we're building the most effective digital treatment to break the cycle of teenage self-harm.  This is not a passive research role You won't spend your time writing decks nobody reads. Your calendar will be full of interviews, onboarding sessions, usability walkthroughs and feedback calls. You'll recruit participants yourself, run the sessions, find the patterns, and sit with the product team until the thing changes. You'll become one of the loudest voices for our users inside the company. Sometimes that means telling us something we don't want to hear. What you'll do

• Run ongoing research with young people, parents and carers, and NHS clinicians, using interviews, usability testing, diary studies and in-product feedback.
• Recruit and build research panels through our NHS partners, schools, charities and lived-experience networks.
• Find where people get stuck, confused, overwhelmed or unsafe, and where they quietly drop off.
• Turn what you learn into clear, prioritised product recommendations, then work with product, design and engineering to ship them.
• Pay close attention to the emotional experience: tone, trust, pacing and safety. In our world, a badly worded screen isn't a UX bug. It can be the reason someone doesn't come back.
• Research how young people, parents and clinicians experience our AI: when they trust it, when they don't, and when they'd rather talk to a human.
• Test AI conversations and outputs with real users, catching the moments where a response feels cold, confusing, generic or unsafe. Feed those moments back into how our AI is designed and evaluated.
• Help define what "good" looks like for AI in our products, from the user's side and not only the model's.
• Use AI tools in your own work to recruit, synthesise and share insights faster, so you spend more time with users and less time transcribing.
• Design research that is trauma-informed, safeguarding-first and ethically sound, working alongside our clinical team.
• Help set up co-production with young people and families, so they shape Speek rather than just test it.
• Build the evidence behind our product decisions, including activation, engagement and retention insights, which also feeds our evaluations and regulatory work. You might be a fit if you
• Have done hands-on user research on a health product.
• Have researched with young people, ideally including under-18s, and know how to do it safely and well.
• Can hold a conversation with a distressed teenager, a sceptical parent and a busy psychiatrist, and adjust to each without losing the thread.
• Are curious about AI and excited by what it can do for families, and sharp about where it can let them down.
• Experience researching conversational AI, chatbots or AI-assisted products.
• Find patterns in messy qualitative data fast, and can explain them simply.
• Are highly organised. Recruitment, consent, scheduling and follow-ups don't slip with you.
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and the pace of an early-stage team. Bonus points A background in psychology, behavioural science, HCI or human-centred design. Familiarity with tools like Dovetail, Maze, Lookback, Hotjar or similar. Good to know This role involves research with children and vulnerable adults, so it requires an enhanced DBS check. You'll be supported by our clinical team, and you'll have proper debrief and wellbeing support. Hearing people's hardest moments is part of this work, and we take that seriously. What we offer £55k–£65k Hybrid, with 2 days/week co-working in central London The chance to shape how a generation of young people and families experience mental health support How to apply Please send your updated LinkedIn profile and a blurb outlining the following: Why Speek? Why this role? Why you? Example of relevant previous work, or link to your portfolio Please send your application to: applynow@lets-speek.com with the subject line: UX Research Lead