About Dust

Summary

Dust is hiring a User Researcher to be the connective tissue between our users and the teams building for them. This is a high-leverage, embedded research role — your work will directly shape product decisions, inform GTM positioning, and surface the insights that help us serve customers like Datadog, 1Password, and Cursor at a higher level. You'll be the first dedicated researcher on the team, which means you'll build the function from the ground up, sitting close to the people shipping the product every day.

What you'll do

Build and own the research function

• Define the research practice at Dust: methodologies, tooling, cadences, and documentation standards

• Establish a consistent feedback loop between qualitative insights and product and GTM decisions

• Create reusable research assets and templates the whole team can leverage

Run end-to-end research studies

• Design and execute qualitative and quantitative studies — interviews, usability tests, concept tests, and surveys

• Identify the highest-leverage research questions and prioritise ruthlessly against the roadmap

• Deliver findings in formats that drive action, not just documentation

Partner with Product and Design

• Embed into product and design workflows so research informs decisions before they're made, not after

• Participate in roadmap discussions as a consistent, evidence-based voice for the user

• Challenge assumptions with data when it matters — and when it's uncomfortable

Support GTM and customer understanding

• Partner with Sales and Customer Success to surface patterns across customer conversations

• Help position Dust's value more precisely by understanding how users actually describe their problems and outcomes

• Contribute to ICP definition and segmentation work grounded in primary research

Scale your impact with AI

• Integrate AI-assisted research tools into your practice to move faster and cover more ground

• Build systems that allow the team to self-serve research insights without requiring your direct involvement every time

Requirements

Every candidate and employee's success is measured against the same 3 dimensions. Aptitude, Attitude and Agency.

Aptitude

• Strong mixed-methods research skills — you know when to go qualitative, when to go quantitative, and how to triangulate both into a clear point of view

• Experience running and synthesising user interviews at pace without sacrificing rigour or clarity

• Ability to translate complex user insights into decision-driving narratives that land with engineers, PMs, and founders alike

• Track record of research directly influencing product or business decisions — not just documentation that gets filed and forgotten

• Actively integrates AI tools to increase research velocity and coverage, treating it as a core part of how you work

Attitude

• Genuinely user-obsessed — you bring the user into conversations that aren't explicitly about research

• Direct communicator who surfaces uncomfortable findings without softening them out of usefulness

• Low-ego and collaborative — equally comfortable partnering with an AE on a sales call as running a structured usability study

• Energised by ambiguity and the challenge of building from scratch in a lean environment without a playbook

• Makes the people around them sharper by actively sharing what they're learning

Agency

• Identifies the most important research questions without waiting to be briefed — you see what's missing and move on it

• Owns projects end-to-end: from framing the question to delivering the insight to following up on whether it changed anything

• Builds research infrastructure that creates leverage for others, not just one-off outputs for yourself

• Comfortable making judgment calls about when research is the right investment and when it isn't

• Has expanded scope in past roles by solving problems no one assigned them

Location

Why Dust

Learn how we think and work.

• Our product constitution, a story about our mission