Zen Ren

About Zen Ren

I’m a user researcher with 10+ years of experience at remote high-growth companies. My research has served API developers, editorial teams, and everyday folks on social media. Right now I\'m focused on agentic and generative AI use cases that enrich how ecommerce and SaaS businesses bring services to their customers.Developer and backend related research is my speciality and I\'ve loved adapting traditional research methods to fit these subjects, getting into the weeds of developer behavior and relational databases. I love UI and frontend related research work as well, but if you specifically need someone who can do research about the backend, reach out for a consultation!I’m an avid storyteller driven by operational excellence and keeping the user at heart.You can find more about me at

Experience

1. Staff User Researcher, Data and Generative Ai

   Algolia

   Nov 2022 — Present

   Research GenAI content needs for ecommerce and SaaS verticals, including content generation and SDKs for developers to create custom GenAI experiences, investigate MCP and RAG needs for the platform, and do foundational exploration around multi-agentic systems- Build and deploy research roadmap for Data Org (data ingestion and transformation, event tracking), insights impacting developer tools and business tools on a B2B search SaaS platform- Insights impacting no-code tools and equivalent full-code tools, vector search, ranking and intent modeling, stronger analytics out of customer data- Lead large scale market positioning research for new products, including monetization, pricing, and naming schemes- Created experimental research methods such as a code version of co-design workshops for developers

Education

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Plan II Honors/English

  2010 — 2014