Senior Applied Scientist, Product Policy Research & Measurement

Quick Facts

• Role: Senior Applied Scientist (Applied Social Science) for Product Policy Research & Measurement

• Focus: Empirical research on AI’s effects on people and society using production data, experiments, and social science methods

Description

You will lead end-to-end empirical studies on AI’s social impact, defining the research question and estimand, designing studies, building datasets, analyzing data, validating methods and measures, and translating evidence into product and policy recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a research agenda on AI’s social impact (well-being, learning, social connection, trust, and human decision-making) with product and policy teams

• Own empirical studies end to end: question/estimand, design choice, dataset building, analysis, and evidence interpretation

• Analyze large-scale production and behavioral data and connect it to experiments, surveys, or external outcomes to measure real-world effects

• Design randomized experiments and credible observational studies; test identification assumptions, quantify uncertainty, and separate association from causal effects

• Develop and validate measures of social outcomes, including human and LLM-assisted annotations; assess measurement error, subgroup performance, and drift

• Produce product and policy recommendations with clear limits on causal interpretation, generalizability, and decision confidence

• Partner across Product Policy, Research, Product, Data Science, Engineering, UXR, Legal, and domain experts; contribute to external publications when appropriate

Requirements

• PhD or equivalent research experience in relevant empirical fields with demonstrated independent research ownership

• Demonstrated expertise in research design, causal inference, experimentation, statistical analysis, and measurement

• Strong SQL plus Python or R, with experience independently constructing and analyzing complex behavioral datasets and producing reproducible research

• Research record that has informed consequential decisions about technology and people, including judgment to identify both findings and unresolved uncertainty

• Clear writing for technical and policy audiences; experience producing rigorous papers or equivalent public technical work

• Ability to move quickly, collaborate cross-functionally, and maintain scientific independence when findings are sensitive or inconvenient

Benefits

Opportunity to shape product and policy decisions with rigorous empirical evidence on AI’s social impact.