Senior Experience Design Researcher - Nectar 360
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Holborn Store Support Centre, London, EC1N 2HT
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 20 May 2025
Requisition ID: 304404
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.
Role
Senior Experience Design Researcher - Nectar 360
Division/Dept
Tech
Reporting to
Head of Product - Media Agency
In a nutshell
At Sainsbury’s we believe that the customer, colleagues and suppliers should be at the heart of everything we do. Our vision is to create the easiest, most enjoyable digital experiences that better serve our customers’, colleagues’ and suppliers ever-changing needs. We work across a range of services, products, touchpoints and tools to deliver distinctive, integrated, and consistent experiences for our customers and colleagues across Sainsbury’s Group (which includes Sainsbury’s Food, Argos, Bank, Nectar, Nectar 360, Tu and Habitat).
We drive brilliant end to end experiences across all our brands in-store and online, operating in agile teams and squads, and working collaboratively with teams right across the business to make the most of the exceptional knowledge, insight and talent across the division.
This role
This role is focused in the exciting B2B world of N360 Media Agency, which is a fully integrated loyalty, insights and media services agency that builds loyalty and personal connections with customers for the biggest UK and global brands. With more than 22 billion rows of Sainsburys data and granular shopping insights form 19 million customers, we have the full picture of what Sainsbury’s shoppers love now and what they will come to love in the future. By looking at what customers buy or not, we gather insights to help Brands develop integrated communication strategies and campaigns.
As an Experience Designer in the N360 Media Agency, you will be part of a team of Experience Designers responsible for designing and delivering seamless experiences across a suite of Digital Platforms. You’ll need to understand our users’ needs, both suppliers and internal colleagues, how they interact with us and what their pain points are. Using research and data, you will take those users pain points and the business needs and design solutions that support their needs.
You will be working within an internal cross-functional team of experienced designers, product managers and engineers alongside stakeholders from other parts of the operation who will rely on your knowledge of user experience, accessibility, and interaction design. In this role you’ll also work and collaborate with third-party Design and Research Agencies to integrate specialist knowledge and expertise into our digital platforms and experiences.
The ideal candidate will have ideally spent time in a mid-weight design role, be used to solving problems independently and with others and advocate the value of data and insight led design. You will need to use design thinking to plan out and execute that work and get feedback from a range of stakeholders and users.
What you need to do
• Identify, define and deliver solutions and opportunities for new propositions, services, products and experience areas that deliver value to customers and colleagues and are directly aligned with Sainsbury’s Group vision and KPIs
• Inspire, coach and motivate your team and junior members of the design community using your expertise and experience
• Lead and advocate for all phases of user-centred design through a data-informed, test-and-learn approach
• Champion the voice of the user through your work and your team’s, organising and conducting user research and user testing to inform concepts and validate designs, and bringing stakeholders on the same journey
• Consider the wider Sainsbury’s ecosystem when designing concepts and solutions that are aligned with our strategic vision of allowing our customers to shop whenever and however they want
• Lead and manage stakeholders and project teams through a user-centred design approach whilst balancing business challenges and strategic vision
• Run workshops with cross-functional teams to inspire user-centred design thinking
• Inspire, coach and motivate your team and junior members of the design community using your design expertise and experience
• Work with the Guidelines team to continuously evolve our design system and guidelines and champion their adoption and implementation
• Consistently embed inclusive design principles in your work and encourage throughout the team
• Work comfortably in or out of product teams, and proactively collaborate with cross-functional teams, championing best practice for design thinking in an agile environment
• Recruit a diverse and inclusive team
What you need to know and show
• A wealth of knowledge as a previous Experience Design Researcher, ideally for a big brand (previous Media Buying research experience is an advantage)
• Ability to demonstrate the behavioural competencies expected of a senior researcher, including initiative, flexibility, influencing, negotiating, strong communication skills and ability to deal with ambiguity
• Extensive hands-on experience managing a wide range of generative and evaluative, qualitative and quantitative research projects, with a strong understanding of related methodologies.
• Experience uncovering unarticulated user needs, synthesising existing research from a variety of sources, and translating observations into digestible, actionable insights that are connected to business goals.
• Ability to distil complex information and concepts into simple formats and compelling stories
• Confidence to challenge established perspectives and approaches, backed up by sound rationale and insights.
• Excellent communication and workshop facilitation skills.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills.
• Experience working collaboratively as part of a multi-disciplinary agile delivery team.
• Strong planning and organisation skills
• A natural curiosity and passion for understanding people, their motivations, their behaviours, and the challenges they face
• A track record of influencing product strategy through high quality research and impactful storytelling.
• Nimble, creative, pragmatic approach to user research
• Confident, can-do attitude
• Ability to manage multiple, changing priorities, and work with diverse personalities and complex dynamics
What we're looking for
Industry experience as a UX or Product Designer is essential. As are the core technical skills outlined in the role details above. Alongside this, we're looking for certain behaviours and competency skills. These skills will help you thrive in a dynamic team like ours.
Skills we're looking for
• User centred design and knowledge of how to design inclusively
• Competency and capability at UX design process, collaboration, and co-creation
• Ability to do visual and interaction design using a design system
• Expertise designing and prototyping with tools such as Figma
• Capable of conducting research and interpreting results
• Influence and negotiation skills
• Adaptable to changing priorities, complexity and unknowns
• Stakeholder engagement, management, and confidence challenging your peers and stakeholders
• Taking initiative and driving change
• Tailoring your approach for different audiences
• Strategic mindedness – thinking of the broader picture and connecting dots.
What decisions I can make including budget
Decisions on best research approach to solve business challenge. There is not budget ownership in this role.
Directly or indirectly manages
This is not a line management role, but you may have the opportunity to guide and mentor junior colleagues in the future.
Support we will provide
• Sainsbury’s intranet (OurSainsburys)
• General Sainsbury’s L&D, line management support
• A thriving product and design culture, opportunity to share work with open, collaborative feedback
• A team of product and design experts to work with, sharing knowledge and expertise
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
