Research Scientist

The role

The Research Scientist will work with the Head Scientist to choose, design, and execute studies to measure and improve how digital twins reproduce human responses. You will interpret findings and write them for internal decision-making and academic publication.

What you will do

• Co-design and run studies comparing system-generated responses with human responses.
• Design, justify, and hone measures of performance.
• Apply and adapt statistical techniques to benchmark and improve simulation performance.
• Design evaluations and experiments with pre-specified analysis plans.
• Design and oversee human rating studies including rater training and coding rubrics.
• Design data collection from third-party sources and human participants.
• Contribute to the research agenda for new modeling approaches.
• Specify analyses for engineers to implement.
• Co-author papers, preprints, and presentations.

Required 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.
• Experience analyzing large-scale telemetry and behavioral datasets.
• Familiarity with machine learning, spanning classical, nonparametric, and LLM-based approaches.
• 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.

Nice to have

• Experience fine-tuning open-weight language models on survey, experimental, or behavioral data.
• Experience building or evaluating calibrated confidence or error-prediction models.
• Experience measuring similarity of open-ended text.
• 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 the company

Outset builds digital twins, which are AI systems that represent specific real people and respond to research questions. The company is backed by top Silicon Valley investors and serves large enterprise customers.