---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Researcher/Economist at Profound'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-researcher-economist-profound-new-york-mkbg1b27ccng'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-10'
---

# Member of Technical Staff, Researcher/Economist at Profound

- **Company:** [Profound](https://feeny.ai/companies/profound)
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/Profound/dfa5c4b6-f1d1-4a38-bd79-c4087fbd41b5

## Job description

Profound is the fastest-growing AI marketing platform, used by 15% of the Fortune 500 including Comcast, Estée Lauder, and Walmart, and innovators like Ramp, MongoDB, and Figma. It is where marketing teams do the work: research, briefs, content, campaigns, reporting, all in one place, alongside agents that carry the load with them. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound’s data shows you what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer joins that data with deep context about our customers to find the opportunities worth acting on, and then puts agents to work: automating reporting, drafting content, auditing pages for readability, running competitive research. It measures what works and gets better every day. Profound is on a mission to help companies understand and control their AI presence. As an Economist and Researcher, you will build trusted industry insights and measurement standards that explain how people use AI for search, shopping, and decision making. You will take real user conversations and AI model behavior and turn them into public-facing research that shapes the narrative of where AI is going and how brands must adapt.

## What you’ll do

- Create accurate and rigorous research that becomes a trusted source of truth for AI usage trends and answer engine behavior
- Engage with media, academia, and industry leaders to educate the market using evidence-grounded analysis
- Identify emerging inflection points in AI search and AI shopping and quantify their impact on consumers and businesses
- Publish research papers, reports, and insights that inform the product roadmap and guide strategic decisions
- Uphold high standards of correctness, reproducibility, and transparency in all published outputs

## Who you are

- Experience solving complex research problems in academia or industry, with 5 or more years of experience
- Strong ability to validate assumptions, pressure test results, and ensure research can withstand scrutiny
- Fluency in SQL and proficiency in R or Python for empirical analysis
- Excellent communication skills and comfort presenting research externally
- Ownership mindset, intellectual curiosity, and passion for answering questions that matter
- PhD in economics or a related quantitative field from a leading academic program
- Experience in technology economics, economic consulting, or policy research
- Record of published research or public-facing insights that influenced decision making
- Motivated by access to rare and unmatched data on how real people use AI to search and shop across major answer engines
- Excited by the opportunity to define industry standard metrics for AI visibility and AI shopping behavior
- Interested in publishing research cited by media, industry analysts, and academic partners
- Comfortable in a fast-paced, high-trust environment where work directly shapes product direction, thought leadership, and category creation
- Drawn to competitive compensation and meaningful equity in a rapidly growing company

Location This is an on-site role based in our Union Square, NYC office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact. We are happy to support visa sponsorship for qualified international candidates. For this role, the expected base salary range is $175,000-$265,000. Comp may vary by location. Profound’s total compensation package is designed to be competitive and includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring. Note: All official communication from Profound will come from a @tryprofound.com email address. If you're contacted by anyone using a different domain, please disregard and report it as spam.

## About Profound

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Profound is the full-stack marketing platform that helps brands understand, analyze, and optimize their visibility across AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C, Unicorn)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (also offices in San Francisco, London, and Buenos Aires)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: James Cadwallader (CEO) and Dylan Babbs (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: AI marketing intelligence, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), brand visibility analytics
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprise marketing teams (e.g., Target, Walmart, Figma, MongoDB, Charlotte Tilbury, US Bank)
- **Mission**: “To build the best technology so businesses can understand and control how they appear in AI answers.”

## Products & Services
- **Answer Engine Insights**: Dashboard providing real-time visibility into how brands are mentioned and rated across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI platforms.
- **Agent Analytics**: Tracks how a brand’s website is crawled and interpreted by major AI models.
- **Prompt Volumes**: Shows what millions of people are asking AI, enabling demand alignment.
- **Profound Agents**: Autonomous AI workers that execute marketing functions (content creation, PR, brand sentiment, SEO/AEO) directly within the platform.
- **Profound Ecosystem**: Includes training, certification, an agency marketplace, and Profound University for marketers.
- **Integrations**: HubSpot, Google Workspace, Gamma, Parallel AI, Vercel (with more being added continuously).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: $1 billion (unicorn as of Series C, February 2026)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised $154.5 million across four rounds; $96M Series C led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (Feb 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic, Saga Ventures, South Park Commons
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 1B+ prompts analyzed daily, 30B+ citations analyzed daily
  - 1800+ customers worldwide
  - 169 employees (monthly headcount growth of +15.1%)
  - 88 open positions
  - Global footprint in 6 countries (US, UK, Argentina, India, Canada, Brazil)

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover advantage** in the AI visibility / AEO category, with proprietary data on how AI models crawl and represent brands.
- **Integrated platform** that moves from insight (analytics) to execution (Agents) in one system, replacing fragmented toolchains.
- **Strong talent pool**: early hires from Yext, 6sense, Amazon, Attentive, and consulting firms.
- **Rapid scaling**: raised from Seed to Series C and reached unicorn status in 18 months.

## Strategic Focus
- **Platform expansion**: Building out the Profound Ecosystem (training, certification, agency marketplace) to create a new category of “Marketing Engineer.”
- **Global reach**: Growing engineering and go-to-market teams across NYC, SF, London, and Buenos Aires.
- **Product depth**: Enhancing Agents with deeper automation while keeping humans in control of strategy.
- **Partnerships & integrations**: Deepening ties with major marketing and productivity tools.

## Why Work Here
- **Compensation**: Strong base salary plus significant equity in a well-funded unicorn.
- **Culture**: High-context, direct communication with a bias for action; “merit-driven, not tenure-driven” career acceleration.
- **Work model**: In-office presence required in NYC, SF, London, or Buenos Aires; daily catered meals, late-night Uber reimbursement, fitness stipend, and flexible time off.
- **Engineering focus**: Key roles include Agent Engineer, AI/ML Engineer, Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer – competing for AI talent against companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- **Growth**: Rapid scaling environment with visible impact; opportunity to define a new category.

## Sources
1. [tryprofound.com](https://www.tryprofound.com/)
2. [tryprofound.com/careers](https://www.tryprofound.com/careers)
3. [LinkedIn / Profound](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound)
4. [Fortune – Exclusive: Profound raises $96M](https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/exclusive-as-ai-threatens-search-profound-raises-96-million-to-help-brands-stay-visible/)
5. [tryprofound.com/blog – Series C announcement](https://www.tryprofound.com/blog/profound-raises-96m-series-c)

## Other roles at Profound

- [Corporate Development Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/corporate-development-lead-profound-new-york-dpp9yxxcgsnt) — New York, NY
- [Strategic Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-operations-profound-new-york-t0eqt3czn9wm) — New York, NY
- [Principal GTM Enablement](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-gtm-enablement-profound-new-york-3fk3vyet994w) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff, TLM, Internal Tooling](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-tlm-internal-tooling-profound-new-york-s79adhrhv1cc) — New York, NY
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- [Strategic Partnerships Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-associate-profound-new-york-bc4y6ttwz3mn) — New York, NY
- [AEO/SEO Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/aeo-seo-lead-profound-new-york-w0tfgs9kj8ct) — New York, NY