alteam
Founding Applied Researcher (Product & Growth)
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London, hybrid · £65,000–£80,000 + equity
You'd be the first research hire at a pre-seed AI startup, and the job is unusually complete: you study the user, design the experiment, write the code, and call the next bet. No PM hands you a spec.
We're Alteam, recruiting on behalf of a fast-growing pre-seed AI startup in London building for small businesses. We'll tell you exactly who they are on the intro call.
ABOUT THE PRODUCT
Small businesses run on commitments that live in people's heads. Our client's product catches every decision and promise made across Slack, email, meetings and docs, then — without being asked — drafts what's owed next: the client update, the quote, the reply. The owner approves. No prompting, no setup. It's the operations layer a ten-person company can't afford to hire. Small, senior team, backed and shipping weekly.
ABOUT THE ROLE
A product that acts without being asked lives or dies on judgement — and judgement is a research problem. Did we correctly catch what the user committed to? Was the draft good enough to send, or just good enough to be annoying? Did the change we shipped move behaviour, or did we only move a number?
You'll own those questions end to end: talk to users, design the study, build the instrumentation and the feature, run the experiment, read the results, and tell the team what they mean—a verdict, not a dashboard for someone else to interpret.
Roughly half building, half user research and experimentation. This is a founding-level seat, which means you'll set how this team decides what's true, and grow the function around you as the company scales.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
- Customer research that changes the roadmap. Interviews, session reviews, diary studies — run by you, not outsourced, and paired with behavioural data so the team hears what users say and what they actually do.
- Evals for an agent that drafts real work. Please define what "ready to approve" means, build the eval set, and keep it honest as prompts and models change. Offline evals plus the in-product signals that matter: approval rate, how much users edit before sending, what they silently delete.
- Experiments that settle things. A/B tests behind feature flags (GrowthBook, PostHog, LaunchDarkly, Statsig) with the statistical rigour to match — sizing, significance, guardrails, and the judgement to know when a test isn't the right instrument.
- The measurement layer. A clean event taxonomy in Amplitude or similar, SQL you write yourself, analysis the whole team trusts. A gap in the data is yours to fix, not someone else's to flag.
- Activation and retention. Find where small-business users lose momentum, form the hypothesis, ship the fix yourself, prove it worked.
- Shipping the change. TypeScript, React, APIs and the database underneath. Onboarding flows, connector fixes, empty states — shipped in days, not sprints.
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WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Research you've led — academic or applied. A PhD is welcome but not required. What counts is that you've owned research end to end: in academia, in a lab, or inside a product team as a UX, user or product researcher. Quantitative and qualitative — you know why a design matters, not just which test to run.
- A mix of UX and code. You can sit with a user in the morning and open a pull request in the afternoon—production or near-production TypeScript and React, or the clear ability to get there fast.
- AI you've built with and measured, not just used. LLM or agent products, prompt engineering, evals, annotation — and a view on where these systems are genuinely unreliable.
- Causal thinking. Confounds, selection effects, and the honesty to say a result doesn't hold.
- Close to the customer. You want to talk to real users, see where they dropped off, and build the fix yourself.
- AI-native. You work with agentic coding tools daily — Claude Code, Cursor or similar — with your own workflows.
- Founder instincts. You care about the business number, not the feature. Bonus if you've shipped something of your own.
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Nice to have: Python for analysis · SMB or self-serve products · chat-native products (Slack, Teams) · OAuth integrations and connectors · design taste for the surfaces you ship · published or open-sourced work.
THE DETAILS
- Full-time, permanent, flexible hours.
- Two days a week together in the London office.
- £75,000–£85,000 + equity + benefits.
- You'll need the right to work in the UK — the company can't sponsor visas for this role.
- Four stages: intro call → research and technical conversation → practical working session → founder conversation.
HOW TO APPLY
Apply here, or send your CV and LinkedIn to info@alteam.io — plus anything that shows how you think: a paper, a repo, a write-up of an experiment you ran, or a product you shipped.
Excited by the role but don't match every line? Get in touch anyway. We'd rather read your work than your checklist.
Alteam is the talent partner for this search and reviews every application personally.
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