Lead Researcher, Brand Performance & Cultural Insights

At PrizePicks, we are the fastest-growing sports company in North America, as recognized by Inc. 5000. As the leading platform for Daily Fantasy Sports, we cover a diverse range of sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, and Esports titles like League of Legends and Counter-Strike. Our team of over 550 employees thrives in an inclusive culture that values individuals from diverse backgrounds, regardless of their level of sports fandom. Ready to reimagine the DFS industry together? Strategic Insights gives PrizePicks a clear, current, and forward-looking view of customers, competitors, and the market, and we are accountable for what they do with it. We work in a fast-moving category: fans, gaming, sports, and the digital entertainment they care about. Category, consumer, and cultural reality shifts quickly, and our business needs to shift with it. We are a senior team within Analytics that combines customer insights, market intelligence, and competitive intelligence with direct partnership across Product, Brand, Marketing, Strategy, Growth, and Government Affairs. We drive decisions at every level of PrizePicks – from executive investment and strategy down to the day-to-day calls product managers, designers, marketers, and analysts make – with insights that are fast, rigorous, and tied directly to the business. The deliverable is the decision; the work isn’t done until consumer and market reality has shifted what someone in the building is doing differently. We are hiring a Lead Researcher to own how we measure, contextualize, and improve PrizePicks’ brand performance and cultural position, end to end. You will complement brand measurement with qualitative insight into the consumer mindset (fan, social, cultural) that surfaces shifts in fan behavior, the category, and the competitive set before they show up in performance data. You will operate as a high-impact individual contributor, working hands-on across every step from problem framing through executive-ready recommendation. You will partner directly with leaders and operators across the business, from SVP to IC, and you will own the stakeholder relationship and the recommendation. No translator in the middle. You build alignment collaboratively, but you stay accountable for the point of view, and you follow your insights into the room where the decision actually gets made. What you’ll do: Connect customer, brand, competitive, and cultural signals to PrizePicks’ business performance and decisions, driving major changes in what the company builds, how it shows up in market, how it invests, and where it should stop. Own PrizePicks’ brand performance measurement end to end. Design and run the studies, synthesize the read, write and ship the recommendation, and follow the changes through until they land in product, brand, or growth decisions. Own the cultural intelligence program end to end. Surveys, social and cultural listening, online communities, and qualitative work that surface shifts in fan behavior, gaming, sports, and adjacent subcultures before they show up in performance data. Run quant and qual end to end, hands on. Design, program, field, and QA studies across brand tracking, segmentation, sizing, and concept and message testing in Qualtrics or comparable. Run qualitative across IDIs, focus groups, digital ethnography, communities, concept testing, and synthesis of social and cultural artifacts. Synthesize outputs that move business performance. Define what is happening, why it matters, what leadership and operators should do next, and what to stop doing. Outputs without a recommendation are not complete work. The job isn’t done until the recommendation is in the hands of the people who can act on it. Create strong, compelling project briefs that frame business problems as research solutions. Ask the questions stakeholders don’t know to ask. Push past surface-level requests to the underlying decision, and make sure every project is pointed at a real growth opportunity. Partner directly with leaders and operators across Product, Design, Brand & Marketing, Retention & Lifecycle, Strategy, and Analytics. Recommend what to accelerate, deprioritize, or stop. Follow the recommendation through until it changes what the team is doing. What you have: Evidence of moving the business: 7+ years in market research or consumer insights where you can point to specific decisions that changed, dollars that moved, or directions that shifted because of work you owned end to end. Years matter less than evidence of impact. Equal command of quant and qual, hands-on. You design and run brand performance trackers that diagnose funnel conversion, not just report levels. You program studies in Qualtrics (or similar), moderate communities, run digital ethnography, synthesize social and cultural listening (Quid, Brandwatch, Sprinklr, or similar), and write the recommendation that comes out the other side. You don’t need a vendor to interpret your own data. Working fluency with qualitative platforms (ListenLabs, dscout, Suzy), statistical tools (R or Python), and BI tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI). AI-fluency: You already use ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in your research work today. You have a point of view on what AI changes about insights, and you can argue it. Storyteller, not reporter: You move a finding from data to a business implication in under sixty seconds. Your recommendations survive being read by an SVP between meetings and hold up when an IC has to execute against them. Comfortable interacting with and challenging stakeholders at any level – exec or IC – when the evidence supports it. You create compelling, clear artifacts that get the point across without unnecessary junk. You understand and write for your audience. Highly collaborative, never deferential: You build alignment with stakeholders rather than dropping reports on them, but you don’t soften the recommendation to make the room comfortable. You stay accountable for the point of view, insight quality, and the follow-through. Fearless curiosity: Relentlessly curious about how customers, fans, and subcultures actually behave. You can contextualize the people behind the data. This is not a methods-only role. What makes you stand out: Experience in daily fantasy, gaming, sports, sports media, or adjacent fan-driven consumer categories. You don’t need to have lived it, but you should be able to talk about it credibly. A clear point of view on what good brand performance and cultural research looks like and a track record of pushing back on requests that won’t change a decision. Experience building or scaling research operations: processes, templates, trackers, dashboards, or self-serve tools that compounded the team’s leverage over time. One more thing: If your last several years have been spent briefing vendors, managing teams, or advising from a distance, this is not your role. We need someone who designs the study, programs the survey, moderates the community, runs the analysis, writes the recommendation, and walks it into the room. End to end means end to end. Where you’ll live: While we prefer candidates based in Atlanta, we are open to qualified applicants from anywhere in the U.S. and are willing to consider remote candidates. #LI-Remote Working at PrizePicks: The typical salary range for this position is $120,000 to $160,000. At PrizePicks, we consider your role, level, and where you'll be working when determining our salary ranges. The compensation info you see on our job postings gives you an idea of the starting pay range for the position. Your actual pay within that range will depend on your specific work location, as well as your skills, experience, and education. Your recruiter will be happy to chat more about the specific pay range for your location and how we arrived at it during the hiring process. This application period will remain open for 30 days. We’re committed to finding the best candidate, so this date may be adjusted, and any changes will be reflected in this posting. Date Posted: 5/26/2026 Benefits you’ll receive: In addition to your great compensation package, full-time employees will be eligible for the following perks: Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans 401(k) plan with company match Annual bonus Flexible PTO to encourage a healthy work/life balance (2 weeks STRONGLY encouraged!) Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules focused on getting the job done, not hours clocked Company-wide in-person events and team outings Lifestyle enhancement program Company equipment provided (Windows & Mac options) Annual performance reviews with opportunities for growth and career development You must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time. PrizePicks is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.