Research Scientist

Outset invented a better way to do research: AI-powered user interviews.

Global brands like Hubspot, Microsoft, Uber and Nestle use Outset to achieve deeper, qualitative insights about their users at unprecedented speed and scale.

The research industry is massive (>$140B and growing) and ripe for disruption. Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services. That's our opportunity.

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  Co-design and run studies that compare system-generated responses with responses from humans, using both qualitative and quantitative measures.

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  Design, justify, and hone measures of performance.

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  Apply and adapt state-of-the-art statistical techniques common to survey methodology and large-scale social data analysis, to benchmark and improve sample- and population-level simulation performance.

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  Design evaluations and experiments with pre-specified analysis plans.

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  Design and oversee human rating studies, including rater training, coding rubrics, and inter-rater agreement measurement.

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  Design data collection from third-party data sources and directly from human participants, including longitudinal and repeated-measures studies.

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  Contribute to the research agenda for new modeling approaches, including evaluation of fine-tuned models and of model calibration.

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  Specify analyses precisely enough for an engineer to implement.

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  Co-author papers, preprints, and presentations.

• A completed or nearly completed PhD in computational social science, communication, HCI, sociology, political science, psychology, statistics, or a related field.

• Peer-reviewed publications on which you were a primary author.

• Working command of graduate-level statistical methodology common to social science, including the assumptions behind each.

• Experience analyzing large-scale telemetry and behavioral datasets, with attention to the validity of the resulting inference.

• Familiarity with machine learning, spanning classical, nonparametric, and LLM-based approaches, including how transformer-based language models work, what fine-tuning does, and how the major model families differ.

• Fundamentals of computing: file systems, software libraries, databases, SQL, and tabular data.

• Ability to work in an environment where most code is produced through agentic coding tools, and to read and check that code.

• Experience fine-tuning open-weight language models on survey, experimental, or behavioral data.

• Experience building or evaluating calibrated confidence or error-prediction models, including deriving decision thresholds from human judgments.

• Experience measuring similarity of open-ended text, for example with embedding-based methods.

• Experience designing or running panel-based data collection with human participants.

• Experience presenting research at academic and/or industry conferences.

• Prior work on generative agents, digital twins, or simulation of human respondents.

• Familiarity with the startup ecosystem

• Familiarity with qualitative interviews and ethnographic methods

• Familiarity with topics in computational linguistics