Senior Researcher & Taxonomist (Contract)

About Handshake

Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions.

In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month.

Why join Handshake now:

• Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel

• Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions

• Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders

• Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue

About Handshake AI

Human data is the core infrastructure to AI advancement. Frontier AI labs currently improve model capabilities with various data-intensive post-training techniques. We believe that data spend for AI training will increase by 3-5x in the next few years and continue for much longer as models take on new domains. Handshake AI supports all of the frontier AI labs, working on their most complex data at the largest scale.

About the Role

We are looking for a highly analytical and research-driven Senior Researcher & Taxonomist to help us understand, categorize, and map the intricate landscape of user jobs and tasks. In this role, you will be the architect of a comprehensive taxonomy that defines the wide range of roles and careers across many domains and subdomains, along with the specific tasks required within them.

You will lead both qualitative and quantitative research initiatives to uncover deep user insights and translate them into a structured, prioritized framework. If you are passionate about the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework, comfortable leveraging cutting-edge AI research tools, and skilled at using data to rank users’ actions and behaviors, we want you on our team.

This is a four-month contract with the possibility of extension.

Key Responsibilities

• Taxonomy Development: Design, build, and continuously refine a scalable taxonomy of jobs, sub-domains, distinct user tasks, tools, and data used across various job roles.

• Mixed-Methods Research: Plan and execute both qualitative (interviews, observational studies) and quantitative (surveys, behavioral data analysis) user research to inform and validate the taxonomy.

• AI-Moderated Research at Scale: Leverage AI-moderated user research tools to conduct, synthesize, and extract qualitative insights from large user cohorts efficiently.

• Task Prioritization & Ranking: Apply basic statistical methods (e.g., MaxDiff, forced ranking, opportunity scoring, weighting, and imputation) to evaluate, rank, and prioritize tasks based on user importance, frequency, and current pain points.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, AI Research, Operations and Engineering to ensure the job and task taxonomy directly informs product strategy and feature development.

• Insight Synthesis: Translate complex, multi-layered research data into clear, actionable frameworks, user models, and documentation.
  

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Experience: 3+ years of experience in UX Research, Information Architecture, Taxonomy, Applied Economics, Human Computer Interaction or a closely related field focusing on user behavior.

• Research Expertise: Proven ability to independently design and run rigorous qualitative and quantitative research studies.

• Taxonomy & Frameworks: Strong understanding of classification systems, hierarchical modeling, and frameworks like Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). Previous experience building taxonomies specifically for B2B software, HR tech, or professional tooling.

• Statistical Literacy and Survey Science: Solid understanding of foundational statistics necessary for quantitative user research. You should be comfortable designing surveys and analyzing data to objectively rank and prioritize user tasks.

• Tech-Forward Approach: Experience with, or a strong willingness to master, AI-moderated user research platforms to scale qualitative data collection.

• Communication: Exceptional analytical and communication skills, with the ability to present complex architectural concepts to stakeholders simply and effectively.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with advanced prioritization frameworks or willingness to develop your own framework.

• Experience with advanced scripting techniques used for data analysis.

• Bayesian statistics