---
title: 'Researcher at Outset'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/researcher-outset-san-francisco-agq2gg9angkn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-12'
---

# Researcher at Outset

- **Company:** Outset
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $120k–$140k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/outset/3fbb835a-f700-42cc-a27c-2945da98415c

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 Incumbents are outdated, slow, and burdened by high-cost services.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

We are looking for a Researcher to join the Customer Experience team at Outset! In this role, you'll own research end-to-end for the prospects and customers assigned to you, helping them go from a question to a clear answer using our AI platform.

## Responsibilities

- Own the research process end-to-end for your projects and pilots: scoping, guide design, recruitment, fieldwork oversight, and analysis
- Manage participant recruitment for the projects you run: define audiences and screeners, work with recruitment partners and our central Ops team, monitor fill and quality, and troubleshoot projects at risk
- Partner with customers and prospects to clarify their research questions or business objectives and turn them into well-structured studies on our platform
- Review and optimize studies customers build themselves, and advise prospects through their evaluation
- Manage project scoping and recruitment operations requests from Sales and customers
- Turn qualitative data into clear, actionable findings customers can use
- Lead customer meetings and readouts with confidence, navigating challenges and guiding customers with research expertise
- Deliver experiences that build satisfaction and lead to strong, ongoing partnerships, whether that means converting a pilot to paid or earning continued work with an existing customer
- Partner with Research Managers and the Senior Research Manager for review and guidance on scoping and strategic decisions, and support them on larger accounts when needed
- Collaborate with Account Executives, Account Directors, and Customer Success Managers on opportunity strategy and to keep research tied to the customer's broader goals
- Collaborate with contractors on projects where they are assigned
- Flag platform and process improvements based on patterns across your projects

## Qualifications

- 3-5+ years in research, insights, consulting, or strategy roles, with strong hands-on qualitative research experience
- Comfortable owning a study and leading customers to a successful project, including navigating challenges and guiding customers with research expertise
- Working knowledge of participant recruitment (screeners, panels and vendors, incentives, quality control)
- Strong written and verbal communication, able to explain research clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
- A proactive, detail-oriented approach to juggling multiple projects and timelines at once
- Curious and coachable
- Comfortable with ambiguity in a fast-moving startup environment

## 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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