A User Experience Researcher at New Relic plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of observability. New Relic is a highly technical platform used by software engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT operations teams to monitor, debug, and optimize their entire technology stack. In this role, you are responsible for translating complex technical workflows into intuitive, powerful digital experiences. You will act as the bridge between raw telemetry data and human-centered design, ensuring that developers can quickly identify root causes and resolve system outages.

The impact of a User Experience Researcher at New Relic cannot be overstated. By conducting deep generative and evaluative research, you directly influence the product roadmap, design systems, and engineering priorities. Your insights help simplify highly complex tasks, such as querying massive datasets, navigating distributed tracing, and configuring alerting systems. Because the target audience consists of highly specialized technical personas, your ability to build deep technical empathy and ask the right questions is critical to the company's competitive edge.

This position is both intellectually challenging and highly rewarding. You will work alongside brilliant product managers, designers, and engineers who are eager to consume your research. Success in this role requires a blend of rigorous research methodologies, systems thinking, and a passion for making highly technical software accessible and delightful.

To help you prepare, we have synthesized representative questions from real interview experiences at New Relic. These questions are designed to evaluate your methodological rigor, behavioral alignment, and ability to handle the unique challenges of researching for technical B2B SaaS platforms.

Portfolio & Case Study Presentation

These questions evaluate your ability to articulate your research process, defend your methodological choices, and demonstrate the tangible business and product impact of your work.

• Walk me through a research project where you had to influence a major product decision. What was your approach?
• How did you choose your research methodology for this specific case study, and what trade-offs did you have to make?

Preparing for your interview at New Relic requires a strategic focus on both your research craft and your ability to communicate with cross-functional partners. Interviewers want to see that you are not just a facilitator of interviews, but a strategic partner who drives product direction.

Technical Empathy & Domain Knowledge – You must demonstrate a strong willingness and ability to understand complex developer workflows. While you do not need to be a software engineer, you must show that you can speak the language of developers, understand their pain points, and grasp technical concepts like cloud infrastructure, APIs, and microservices.

Research Rigor & Methodological Flexibility – You should be prepared to defend your choice of methodologies. Whether you are running usability tests, conducting diary studies, or performing heuristic evaluations, you must explain the "why" behind your choices and show how you adapt your methods to fit fast-moving agile development cycles.

Cross-functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Influence – New Relic values collaborative partners. You will be evaluated on how you build relationships with product management, engineering, and design, and how you democratize research to empower your team to make user-centric decisions.

Value Alignment & Curiosity – The team at New Relic is highly passionate about their work and the technical challenges they solve. Showing authentic curiosity about the observability space, asking insightful questions, and exhibiting a supportive, collaborative attitude will go a long way in your cultural assessment.

The hiring process for a User Experience Researcher at New Relic is designed to be thorough, transparent, and highly candidate-friendly. The company places a strong emphasis on mutual fit, ensuring you have ample opportunity to ask questions and learn about the team culture, product challenges, and company vision.

The process typically begins with a recruiter screen to discuss your background and align on high-level expectations. This is followed by a hiring manager interview, which focuses on your past experiences, research philosophy, and interest in the role. The core of the evaluation takes place during the virtual onsite loop, which includes a formal portfolio presentation, a Q&A session, and a series of 1:1 interviews with cross-functional team members. Depending on the region and specific team, a small, practical take-home task may also be included to assess your hands-on research planning and analysis capabilities.

The timeline above outlines the standard progression from your initial contact to the final offer stage. You should use this sequence to pace your preparation, focusing first on high-level storytelling for your hiring manager call, and then diving deep into your case studies and methodological frameworks for the portfolio presentation and team rounds.

To excel in the New Relic interview loop, you must understand the specific competencies your interviewers are looking for during each interaction.

The Portfolio Presentation & Case Study

This is the cornerstone of your interview loop. You will present one or two past research projects to a panel of researchers, designers, and product managers. The panel wants to see your end-to-end research process, from initial ambiguity to final product impact.

Be ready to go over:

• Problem Definition – How you framed the research question and aligned stakeholders on the goals.
• Methodology Selection – The rationale behind your chosen methods and how you handled constraints.
• Synthesis & Insights – How you translated raw data into clear, compelling themes and user archetypes.
• Impact & Outcomes – The concrete changes made to the product or strategy as a result of your work.

Example scenarios:

• Presenting a case study where you researched a complex B2B workflow and successfully simplified it.
• Explaining how you handled a situation where your research findings challenged a strongly held executive belief.

Research Methodology & Complex Problem Solving

Observability products are highly complex. You must demonstrate that you can design research studies that yield deep, actionable insights even when dealing with abstract concepts and highly specialized user groups.

Be ready to go over:

• Recruiting Technical Users – Creative strategies for sourcing and engaging busy developer personas.
• Mixed-Methods Approaches – Combining qualitative user feedback with quantitative product metrics.
• Researching Abstract Concepts – Designing studies for features that do not have a traditional visual UI, such as APIs or CLI tools.

Advanced concepts (less common):

• Conducting research on machine learning and AI-driven features (e.g., AIOps).
• Designing longitudinal studies to track user sentiment and platform adoption over time.

Example scenarios:

• Designing a study to evaluate the usability of a new query language interface.
• Outlining a research plan to investigate why users are dropping off during a complex cloud integration setup.

Stakeholder Management & Collaboration

Research at New Relic is a team sport. Your interviewers will evaluate how well you integrate into cross-functional teams and how you drive user-centered design across the broader organization.

Be ready to go over:

• Democratizing Research – Empowering designers and product managers to conduct light research while maintaining quality.
• Handling Pushback – Navigating disagreements with engineering or product management regarding research findings.
• Communicating Insights – Utilizing diverse formats (e.g., workshops, video clips, reports) to share insights effectively.

Example scenarios:

• Describing a time you ran a collaborative workshop to help engineers build empathy for the end user.
• Explaining how you prioritize a backlog of research requests from multiple product teams.