Senior People Scientist

About the team / role
The Senior People Scientist role leads WEX's employee listening and assessment capabilities, ensuring we collect high-quality data about the employee experience and talent outcomes and translate it into data-driven decisions. This role partners closely with the Head of People Analytics, HR COE leaders, and HRBPs to support the design, implementation, and evaluation of WEX's survey and assessment practices, ensuring they drive business impact.

This is a mid-career role, well-suited for an experienced professional with formal training in I/O Psychology or a related field who is looking to take the next step in their career.

This role supports remote or hybrid work for candidates based in Portland (ME), Boston (MA), New York City (NY), Chicago (IL), Washington (D.C.), Dallas (TX), the San Francisco Bay Area (CA), or Seattle (WA).

How you'll make an impact

Employee Listening & Surveys:

• Manage the execution of enterprise-wide as well as topic-driven or function-specific employee surveys (e.g., engagement, pulse, lifecycle), including timeline coordination, vendor administration, and quality control.

• Develop and own a multi-year employee listening strategy and roadmap, aligning the program with WEX and HR priorities.

• Lead survey design, item validation, and sampling strategies aligned to surveys that support business and people priorities.

• Prepare clear, accurate survey insights for HR partners and business leaders.

• Maintain benchmarks, norms, and trend analyses across survey cycles.

Assessment & Measurement:

• Manage the administration and ongoing evaluation of assessment tools and interview resources used across hiring, development, and other talent programs.

• Serve as the methodological authority / internal expert on psychometric standards, validation strategies, and legal standards to support rigorous decisions around people assessment.

• Maintain documentation on assessment and interview practices to ensure consistency, fairness, and defensibility.

• Partner with Talent Acquisition and HRBPs to ensure assessments and interview tools are implemented as designed and interpreted appropriately by recruiters and hiring managers.

Insights & Enablement:

• Translate survey and assessment findings into compelling, data-driven narratives for the executive leadership team, HR leadership team, and HR business partners.

• Act as an internal consultant to senior leaders and HR business partners, helping them interpret data and translate it into interventions to support key talent outcomes.

• Contribute to recurring listening insights (e.g., engagement drivers, focus areas) used in action planning.

• Support continuous improvement of listening programs by identifying opportunities to simplify, automate, or improve data quality.

• Play a role, as needed, in evaluating AI decision support tools, ensuring that any implemented AI systems meet legal and compliance standards.

Business Outcomes Driven by This Role:

• Employee Engagement: This role supports the connection between employee experience and talent outcomes like job performance and turnover. The Employee Listening program is instrumental in gathering feedback from employees to support leadership decisions and manager effectiveness.

• Hiring and Promotion Decision Improvement: Partnering with the TA team, this role introduces data-driven tools that improve hiring and promotion decisions, leading to cost avoidance, driving job performance, and minimizing legal and compliance risks.

• Better Leadership Decision Making and Execution: By supporting various business priorities like AI Workforce Enablement, operating model transformation, etc., this role helps leaders navigate and execute organizational change so that WEX can continue to grow and adapt to new market challenges.

Experience you'll bring

• 3-5 years of experience in people analytics, organizational research, assessment, or a related field (beyond academic training) is strongly preferred.

• Academic background (Master's or PhD) in I/O Psychology or other Quantitative Psychology discipline is required.

• Working knowledge of survey and assessment design fundamentals, as well as advanced statistical techniques (IRT, SEM, EFA/CFA, multilevel modeling) is required.

• Strong ability to work with data in Excel/Google Sheets, and proficiency leveraging either Python or R for statistical analysis are required.

• Basic AI literacy (familiarity with LLM tools, prompt engineering, output interpretation) and related skills (critical thinking, evaluative judgement, cognitive flexibility) is preferred.

• Strong written communication and oral presentation skills are needed, especially the ability to translate technical findings to layman's terms for stakeholders.

• Strong professional maturity to manage relationships with senior stakeholders, maintain discretion and confidentiality when needed, and understand nuanced organizational dynamics to ensure findings and recommendations are contextually relevant.