Director of Research

About Skyscanner

Everyone loves travelling, but planning is not without its challenges. That's why we've spent 20 years building tools that turn travel-planning chaos into a breeze. Today, around 100 million travellers count on us every month to skip the whole “47 browser tabs open” phase and find flights, cars, and hotels quickly and easily.

Joining Skyscanner means becoming part of a global brand that's striving to become the planet's go-to travel hack accessible for all.

Our vision? To be the world's number one travel ally. (Ambitious? Yes, but, hey, that's what got us here).

About the role

Hybrid

This is a senior leadership role for a bold, strategic thinker who thrives on complexity, acts with clarity, and inspires through impact. You’ll be the head of discipline, at the forefront of helping Skyscanner understand travellers better than anyone else — and turn those insights into brilliant product, marketing and business decisions.

You’ll lead and scale a collaborative, cross-European team of researchers and partner with stakeholders across the company to elevate our research maturity. You’ll define and deliver on a compelling long-term research vision while enabling all teams to understand our users and partners more deeply.

What you’ll be doing

• Building a world-class team: You’ll lead and mentor qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods researchers across our three European offices, growing talent and capability at every level.
• Creating strategic clarity: You’ll develop and evolve a long-term vision for research, ensuring strategies remain closely aligned to our growth goals and traveller needs.
• Connecting insight to action: You’ll integrate data across research, market, behavioural, and partner sources — driving clarity, consensus and confident decision-making across disciplines.
• Solving for complexity: You’ll proactively define and address ambiguous, high-impact business problems, often before they’re fully formed.
• Partnering for impact: You’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with senior stakeholders to shape roadmaps, influence strategy, and bring the voice of the user into every room.
• Operating with lean impact: You’ll scale the team and function efficiently, delivering insight that moves product outcomes and commercial results.
• Championing the craft: You’ll create an environment where research quality is high, delivery is timely, and excellence in execution is the norm.

About you

• Experienced at scale: You’ve led research functions at Director or Head-of level in fast-paced tech environments, ideally with marketplace or platform exposure.
• Expert across methods: You bring hands-on experience with a range of research approaches and are skilled at coaching teams in both qual and quant.
• Business-focused and outcome-driven: You’ve successfully led complex initiatives that influenced high-level product and company direction.
• Collaborative to the core: You work fluidly across teams, levels, and functions — building trust, consensus and shared ownership of outcomes.
• Deep product and brand literacy: You know how research fits into the broader product lifecycle and how it can inform marketing and consumer decisions.
• People-first leader: You’ve built and grown inclusive teams, developed future leaders, and fostered psychological safety.
• Curious and adaptable: You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and fast change — bringing flexibility, resilience and vision.

What it's like here

We are the real deal — no corporate gloss, no empty promises. Just a team of genuinely curious, caring humans, building things that help travellers explore the world a little easier.

Skyscanner is made up of brilliant humans from every corner of the world. We believe travel makes the world better - and that the same is true of our diverse teams. We're proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and products that are accessible to all.

Sound like your kind of adventure? Apply now and help us shape the future of travel.

We're committed to ensuring our application and recruitment processes are inclusive and accessible to everyone. If you require any reasonable adjustments or accommodations for interviews, please let us know. If you'd like more information on any of our policies, such as hybrid working or Parental Leave policies (typically we pay a minimum of 24 weeks birth parent/maternity leave globally), our recruitment team can provide more information on these.