---
title: 'Program Manager - Research Operations at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-research-operations-outset-san-francisco-4h9qpq7d39j0'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Program Manager - Research Operations at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$200k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/bfbc9270-a47e-4b0b-b177-67ec84823e62

## Job description

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 Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services.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.

Outset is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and raised a $30M Series B in December 2025—less than six months after our Series A—led by Radical Ventures with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), 8VC, Y Combinator, and Adverb Ventures.

The raise follows a breakout year, with our business growing 8x as enterprise customers across industries adopt our category, AI‑moderated research, as the new standard for understanding people.

We’re a tight-knit team serving some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Participant recruitment at Outset spans a global partner network, internal process, and the product experience itself — and this role owns all three. Rather than running recruitment study by study, you'll build the system that makes it predictable at scale. You'll be Outset's authority on recruitment: the connective tissue between our partners, our teams, and our product.

## Responsibilities

- Own partner performance and communication, with a system to assess and continually optimize each partner's quality, reliability, and best-fit use cases.
- Negotiate preferred rates and commercial terms, and build the feasibility process (incidence rates, targeting, which vendor for which use case) that keeps recruitment predictable as volume grows.
- Design and document the end-to-end recruitment process, from intake through delivery — with fill-time benchmarks by audience/screening criteria and a clear playbook for tracking and escalating at-risk projects.
- Build the internal enablement and training that gets the GTM team up to speed and confident in how recruitment works.
- Partner with Product and Engineering on the recruitment experience — fraud detection, identity verification, quality flagging, refunds — bringing structured, evidence-backed problems into the product roadmap.
- Identify and spec internal tooling that reduces manual ops work.
- Translate how recruitment works into content for two audiences: best-practice guidance for Account Directors/AEs, and customer-facing explanations of our role, our partners' role, and what to expect.

## Qualifications

- 5–10 years in research operations, participant recruitment, or panel/vendor management, with deep expertise in digital qualitative recruitment; experience with quantitative recruitment is a plus
- Hands-on understanding of how participant recruitment actually works: panels and marketplaces, screeners, incidence and feasibility, soft launches, quotas, incentives, fraud, and quality control.
- Track record managing vendors and partners — selecting, negotiating, holding accountable, managing spend.
- Genuine program management ability — you can hold a messy, cross-functional problem in your head, sequence it, and drive it to a working system.
- Experience at both a large organization and a startup. We want the enterprise process instincts and the scrappiness to build fast without waiting for permission.
- Strong communicator — able to distill complex, cross-functional information into clear training, documentation, playbooks, and customer-facing content.
- Comfortable with AI tooling for content and automation; experience building AI tooling/dashboards a plus.
- Highly independent — this role is built for someone who defines priorities as much as executes them.
- Bonus: experience at a research platform, panel provider, or research agency.

## About Outset

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Outset is an AI-moderated research platform that combines conversational AI, behavioral intelligence, and emotional analysis to let companies run high-quality qualitative interviews and research studies at massive scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Aaron Cannon (CEO) and Michael Hess

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Software Development / AI-Moderated Research & Insights Platform
- **Target customers**: Enterprise research teams (UX/Market/Consumer Insights), large corporations, and product teams (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "The future of innovation begins with listening to humans." Understanding people’s needs, motivations, and behaviors is the hardest and most important challenge for businesses; Outset makes that understanding effortless and scalable.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Moderated Interviews**: Conduct hundreds of AI-moderated interviews simultaneously in any language (video, voice, or text). The AI moderator dynamically probes participants based on audio and visual cues to uncover the "why" behind answers.
- **Instant Synthesis & Analysis**: Automatically generates highly relevant summaries, themes, impactful quotes, and customizable highlight reels based on research objectives, eliminating manual tagging and sifting.
- **Participant Recruitment**: Recruit hundreds of participants directly within the platform, or share an interview link with any external list.
- **Guide Set Up**: Effortlessly set up interview guides using AI, with qualitative/quantitative questions, advanced probing guidelines, and intelligent skipping logic.
- **Easy Stakeholder Shareout**: Get instant top-line reports, custom AI-generated reports, highlight reels, and ready-to-share PowerPoint decks to integrate research into decision-making.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue of USD 8,500,000 (as of latest data). Total Funding of USD 51,250,000.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Lead investors include **Radical Ventures** (Series B), **8VC** (Series A), with participation from 24 investors in earlier rounds. Trusted by enterprises like **Microsoft**, **Nestle**, **Uber**, **Hubspot**, and **Away**.
- **Growth Signals**: Massive headcount growth of **+563.6% year-over-year** (now 54 employees). Customer research coverage from 1.1B+ possible participants across 85+ countries, with over 500K studies run on the platform.

## Competitive Advantages
- Proprietary AI that bridges the "say-do gap" by probing in real-time based on audio and visual cues, not just recall.
- Multi-modal, multi-lingual scaling: enables research in any language, at any timezone, with continuous, multithreaded AI-moderated conversations.
- Enterprise-grade simplicity: designed for large research teams, removing scheduling friction and operations overhead so research happens in days, not months.
- End-to-end platform: from participant recruitment, guide setup, AI-moderation, to instant analysis and stakeholder shareout — a single integrated suite.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand leadership in replacing traditional, slow qualitative research (surveys, live interviews) with instant, scalable AI-moderated studies.
- Deepen enterprise penetration with top-tier clients (Microsoft, Nestle, Uber, HubSpot) by continuing to add advanced behavioral and emotional analysis features.
- Scale the platform’s capabilities to cover the entire research lifecycle more comprehensively, continuing to invest heavily in R&D.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: "Supportive founders and seasoned investors foster community, without startup toxicity." Team is described as "smart, kind, and driven teammates who know how to make work fun." Founders are very hands-on and accessible.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Primarily in-office at a "million-dollar office space" in SF with sweeping views and quick access to Market Street.
- **Notable perks**: Daily catered lunches and snacks with flexible dietary options, unlimited PTO, comprehensive health insurance (medical/dental/vision), unlimited budget for productivity tools, commuter benefits, allowance for continuing education, 401k with 6% match.
- **Engineering culture**: A strong technical focus (backend and frontend engineers) working on state-of-the-art AI and NLP. 9 active job postings across sales, engineering, marketing, design, and operations.
- **Who should apply**: People passionate about AI, user research, and building products that make human understanding scalable. The company values balance, growth, and high-impact work without "startup toxicity."

## Sources
1. [outset.ai](https://outset.ai/)
2. [outset.ai/careers](https://outset.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/outset-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/outset-ai)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/outset](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/outset)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset)

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