Research Scientist — AI‑Driven User Research & Digital Twins

Outset; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Outset is seeking a Research Scientist to work with the Head Scientist to design studies, define measurements, interpret results, and write findings for internal decision-making and potential academic publication.

You will bring methodological training in computational social science, data science, survey methodology, human-computation interaction, and experiment design, with experience analyzing large-scale datasets and applying ML approaches.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Co-design and run studies that compare system-generated responses with responses from humans, using both qualitative and quantitative measures.
• Design, justify, and hone measures of performance.
• 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.
• Design evaluations and experiments with pre-specified analysis plans.
• Design and oversee human rating studies, including rater training, coding rubrics, and inter-rater agreement measurement.
• Design data collection from third-party data sources and directly from human participants, including longitudinal and repeated-measures studies.
• Contribute to the research agenda for new modeling approaches, including evaluation of fine-tuned models and of model calibration.
• Specify analyses precisely enough for an engineer to implement.
• Co-author papers, preprints, and presentations.

Skills

Statistical methods

Dataset analysis

Experiment design

Research collaboration

Technical writing

Python/SQL

Code reading

Education

PhD in computational social science / related field

Peer‑reviewed publications as primary author

Graduate-level statistics knowledge

Tools

SQL

Python

ML frameworks

LLM concepts

Job description

Outset is seeking a Research Scientist to work with the Head Scientist to design studies, define measurements, interpret results, and write findings for internal decision-making and potential academic publication.

You will bring methodological training in computational social science, data science, survey methodology, human-computation interaction, and experiment design, with experience analyzing large-scale datasets and applying ML approaches.