---
title: 'Research Scientist at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-scientist-outset-san-francisco-21fypzb46y2w'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-26'
---

# Research Scientist at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$240k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-26
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/a9a0c4b2-b42c-4db2-9d83-c434b894799a

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 Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services.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

Outset builds digital twins: AI systems that represent specific real people and respond to research questions the way those people would. The Digital Twins Team runs an ongoing research program to measure and improve how faithfully these systems reproduce human responses and behavior, across a range of cross-sectional levels of analysis. The Research Scientist works directly with and reports to the Head Scientist. Together you will choose what to study, design the studies, define how results are measured, interpret the findings, and write them up for internal decision-making and, where appropriate, for academic publication. You will bring current methodological training in computational social science, data science, survey-methodology, human-computation interaction, and experiment design.

## 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.

## Qualifications

- 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.

## Preferred Qualifications

- 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

## 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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