Principal Measurement Scientist

Tracksuit Limited; Auckland; On-site; NZD 219,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Tracksuit is seeking a Principal Measurement Scientist to define the scientific agenda, design the programme, and produce the evidence base for how Tracksuit measures brand health.

It’s an academically rigorous role that combines hands-on data work—designing experiments, running analyses, and validating findings—with leadership of multi-year measurement strategy across markets and partners.

Qualifications

• PhD or Master’s in psychology, statistics, behavioural science, or similar.
• 10+ years of quantitative research or measurement science in a rigorous environment.
• Expert in survey methodology, measurement theory, psychometrics, and respondent psychology.
• Comfortable challenging assumptions and defending evidence-based positions.
• Able to produce scientific documentation that could withstand peer review.

Responsibilities

• Create and lead Tracksuit's measurement science programme. Define questions, methods, evidentiary standards, and a multi-year horizon.
• Audit and challenge existing methodology with scientific independence.
• Design, run, and analyse academic-level validation studies with power calculations and experimental design.
• Own the science of respondent psychology and investigate attention, cognitive load, satisficing, order effects, and fatigue; develop mitigation strategies.
• Define and maintain Tracksuit's metric and methodology frameworks with documented standards.
• Build the Methodology Knowledge Base with rationale, standards, validation evidence, and decisions.
• Assess external data sources for scientific credibility and use of synthetic modelling.
• Engage with the academic community and represent Tracksuit at conferences where relevant.

Skills

Survey methodology

Measurement theory

Psychometrics

Respondent psychology

Statistical analysis (R/Python)

Data analysis

SQL

Education

PhD or Master’s in psychology, statistics, behavioural science, or similar

10+ years in quantitative research or measurement science

Tools

R

Python

SQL

Snowflake

Job description

Tracksuit exists to help marketers prove their brand building is working. We give teams the data they need to make smarter decisions, convince stakeholders, defend budgets, and track their progress. The brand tracking industry is dominated by 100-page reports, static data and big price-tags. We're doing things differently by being built for the modern marketer: always-on, accessible, and approachable.

We're now tracking more than 1,000 brands across 25 countries globally. With offices in Auckland, Sydney, London and New York City, we're scaling fast with a brilliant team of collaborative and ambitious humans. Our culture is defined by "high care, high performance". We strive to be the best and look after each other while we do it.

At Tracksuit, we're building the world's most loved brand-tracking platform - simple on the surface, scientifically serious underneath. As we scale globally, the stakes get higher: more brands, more markets, more scrutiny, more ambition. To meet that moment, we're expanding our Research Governance function and looking for a Principal Measurement Scientist to become the intellectual engine of our measurement system.

This is not a typical "research role". It's a Principal Investigator position in the truest academic sense; defining the scientific agenda, designing the programme, and producing the evidence base that underpins how Tracksuit measures brand health. It's also hands-on. You'll be in the data yourself: designing the experiments, running the analysis, and standing behind the numbers.

If you're an academically trained measurement scientist who loves hard questions, rigorous validation, and the psychology of how humans respond to surveys at scale, this is your playground.

Why this role exists

Tracksuit's methodology has grown fast and served us well - but now we're operating in more markets, under greater partner scrutiny, and with increasingly ambitious product goals. To keep pace, our measurement foundations must be academically defensible, not just commercially convenient.

Your mission: Reviewing and rationalising the rigour of our current tracking, then build the forward looking, multi-year measurement science programme that answers the hardest questions about how brand tracking should work. You'll define the investigations, design the tests, run the analysis, partner with Survey Ops and Data Science, interpret the findings, and build the scientific backbone that Marketing Science, Product, and Governance rely on.

You're not handed a roadmap. You write it.

What You'll Do

• Create and lead Tracksuit's measurement science programme Define the questions, methods, evidentiary standards, and sequencing across a multi-year horizon.
• Audit and challenge existing methodology Assess every core methodological choice with scientific independence - confirm, refine, or flag for investigation.
• Design, run, and analyse academic-level validation studies Partner with Survey Operations on design and execution. Own the analysis yourself, power calculations, experimental design, statistical validation, working with Data Science where scale or infrastructure demands it.
• Own the science of respondent psychology Interrogate respondent level data to investigate attention, cognitive load, satisficing, recognition effects, order effects, and panel fatigue; and build evidence-based mitigation strategies.
• Define and maintain Tracksuit's metric and methodology frameworks Conceptual definitions, incidence rules, measurement standards, and survey design constraints - all documented with academic rigour.
• Build the Methodology Knowledge Base Create Tracksuit's scientific record: rationale, standards, validation evidence, and decisions
• Assess external data sources with scientific independence Evaluate synthetic modelling inputs and multi-source data for scientific credibility.
• Engage with the academic community Build a scientific advisory network; maintain relationships with external academics; represent Tracksuit at conferences where relevant

What You'll Bring

• Deep academic training - ideally PhD/Master's in psychology, statistics, behavioural science, or similar.
• 10+ years in quantitative research or measurement science, ideally in a rigorous empirical environment (Ehrenberg-Bass or equivalent strongly preferred).
• Expert in survey methodology, measurement theory, psychometrics, and respondent psychology.
• Comfortable challenging assumptions and defending evidence-based positions.
• Able to produce scientific documentation that could withstand peer review.
• Collaborative across Survey Ops, Data Science, Product, and Marketing Science - without compromising scientific standards.
• Commercially aware enough to understand constraints, but scientifically independent enough not to bend to them.
• Hands-on statistical analysis (R, Python etc) for study design, validation analysis, and power calculations.
• Strong experimental design and measurement validation skills, including power analysis and test design.
• Able to get to data directly: SQL, Snowflake
• Practical proficiency with survey data collection and fieldwork platforms.

Ready to build the scientific backbone of Tracksuit?

We'd love to meet you.

Compensation Range: A$178K - A$220K