User Researcher

Description

About Dust

Work is being rewritten, and the people holding the pen are the ones who actually run it.

With enterprise-grade governance, flexible model choice, and a collaborative interface for humans and agents to work together, Dust empowers AI Operators at the world’s fastest-moving companies to rewire how work gets done.

With 70%+ weekly active users, people stick with Dust as much as they do with Slack and Notion. We don't get piloted and shelved. We land once, and spread. We're at an exciting stage of our journey, and growing fast.

We're serving great customers like Datadog, 1Password, Cursor, Clay, Vanta and Persona, and aim to x5 our growth by the end of 2026.

Dust is backed by Sequoia with a determined team of optimists (coming from Stripe, OpenAI, and Stanford) who like to focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously while doing so. The Generalist named us among the Future 50 .

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Conditions

We're prioritizing building our team with an in-person culture at our offices in Paris, London, San Francisco, and New York because we value the magic that happens when talented people work closely together.

We have an office-first culture. Some of the best things about building at Dust are the energy, the fast decisions, and the unexpected conversations that unlock a hard problem, which happen because we are in the same room. Being together is not a formality, it is how we do our best work, and it is something we actively protect.

That said, we hire people with strong judgement and we extend that trust to how they manage their time. When working from home makes more sense for what you need to get done that day, we trust you to make that call.

Why Dust

The models are powerful enough. What's missing is the product layer where AI meets how companies actually work. That's what we're building: the infrastructure that lets any team turn scattered knowledge and tools into coordinated execution with agents they build, own, and run themselves.

We use Dust ourselves every day. We get to shape how humans and agents collaborate while solving our own problems with the product we ship. That loop is rare, and it's why we move fast.

If you're excited about defining a new category and want to join a determined team of optimists who focus on users, ship fast, and don't take themselves too seriously, we'd love to talk.

Even if you don't check every box in our requirements, we encourage you to apply. We value diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and we're more interested in your potential and passion than a perfect match to our checklist.

Learn how we think and work.

Our product constitution, a story about our mission

Your Next Co-Worker Isn’t Human , Stanislas Polu , VivaTech 2026. A conversation about AI agents taking on larger parts of work and how teams collaborate with them.

Dust: Gabriel Hubert on Enterprise AI , Gabriel Hubert , Nasdaq, published May 7, 2026. On Dust’s approach to enterprise AI and building the company in Europe.