User Experience Researcher

Human-centered physical intelligence requires deeply understanding people — how they live and work in the real world, how they perform skilled tasks, what they're trying to accomplish, and what they know that never gets written down. We're building a new kind of intelligence that runs on real hardware, and how people and intelligent agents should work together is still an open question that research has to answer. We're looking for an experienced researcher to lead that discovery: running research with real people in the homes and workplaces where our technology will operate, defining how we measure success, and running the large-scale data collections. Your research sets the design direction and shapes the intelligence behind it. What You'll Do Evaluative & Field Research Design and lead moderated studies and contextual inquiry with real people in real environments, alongside structured internal test rounds on early prototypes. Develop research methods for new forms of human-machine interaction on real hardware, studied in the field where the system is used. Study how people and intelligent agents collaborate on real tasks, drawing on human-robot interaction (HRI) and human-AI interaction methods. Run our external research programs end to end — protocols, recruiting, facilitation, and synthesis — and turn each round into a clear, prioritized set of product implications. Define what "ready for real users" means for a capability and hold our systems to that bar before they ship. Customers & Market Lead market and user research to sharpen our understanding of who our users are, what they're trying to do, and where we create the most value. Own the customer feedback loop so insights flow continuously back into the roadmap. Define and track the metrics that tell us whether our systems are working, and build the instrumentation to measure them. Build the foundational research assets a growing product organization runs on: personas, journey maps, jobs-to-be-done, and a living research repository. Data Collection Plan, run, and manage large-scale, multi-participant data collections across diverse real-world tasks and environments, capturing how people perform real work and how they interact with intelligent agents while doing it — a critical input to the data engine that trains our AI systems. Design collection protocols that yield high-quality, multimodal, representative data, and partner with our AI and engineering teams so the data meets the needs of the models it feeds. Build the operational infrastructure that makes data collection a scalable, repeatable process, with participant privacy and informed consent built in from the start. What We're Looking For 5+ years of UX or user research experience, with a track record of running rigorous qualitative and mixed-methods studies on early prototypes. Experience collecting and analyzing interaction data between people and intelligent agents — robots, embodied AI, or conversational systems — grounded in human-robot interaction (HRI), human-AI collaboration, or human-agent teaming methods. Experience handling privacy-sensitive research data: designing informed-consent and data-handling protocols for recorded studies (video, audio, and personal information), de-identification and secure storage, IRB or equivalent ethics review, and working within GDPR, CCPA, and similar frameworks. Experience designing research or data-collection protocols for novel or physical form factors — robotics, wearables, smart-home and connected devices, spatial computing, or other emerging platforms — or for training data that captures human skill and behavior, is a strong plus. Fluency across qualitative and quantitative methods, from open-ended discovery and field research to success metrics and instrumentation. Strong research-operations instincts — you've built recruiting pipelines, consent workflows, and session logistics that run smoothly at scale. Sharp synthesis and communication — you turn a handful of sessions into a short, concrete set of product implications and make them land with founders and engineers. Startup DNA: high ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to make pragmatic calls on a small, fast-moving team. Based in the Seattle area — research and data-collection sessions require in-person facilitation. Bonus: running demonstration or teleoperation data collection for robot learning, evaluating robot behavior with real users (proxemics, motion legibility, trust in autonomous systems), field studies of robots or automated systems in homes, warehouses, or workplaces, or published work at HRI, RO-MAN, CHI, or CSCW on human-robot or human-agent interaction. Who You'll Work With You'll be working with a tightly knit team that has pioneered frontier AI research, shipped tens of millions of devices, scaled infrastructure used by millions every day, and defined how people and machines interact in the physical world. They've done it at Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Valve. Why Join Early role at a funded startup founded by people who built some of the most advanced AI, systems, and hardware programs in the industry. Define how people live and work alongside a new class of intelligent systems — your research sets the design direction and your data-collection work shapes what the AI learns. Build the research practice from the ground up, with the latitude to choose the methods, tools, and cadence that fit the problem. Small team, exceptional peers, no bureaucracy — findings turn into product decisions the same week. Compensation Competitive salary plus meaningful early-stage equity and benefits. All applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Noösphere will consider sponsorship of qualified candidates for employment visa status where required. Noösphere is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. #J-18808-Ljbffr