About Us
Emporia is a venture-backed research platform that connects companies with verified business and healthcare professionals. Agencies, brands, and healthcare organizations use Emporia to gather on-demand insights for product development, sales enablement, competitive analysis, and more.
Professional research has traditionally been slow, manual and vulnerable to fraud. We built Emporia to fix that. Our platform draws on nearly one billion professional firmographic and demographic records and uses AI to match each study with the right respondents, verify that they are who they say they are, and keep fraudulent responses out of our customers’ data. Customers get the tools to run their research end to end, and the professionals who take part are paid for their expertise.
That same verified network is increasingly valuable to AI companies. As models take on specialized work, they need judgment from people with real professional expertise, not anonymous crowds. Emporia gives AI teams access to verified physicians, IT decision-makers, finance leaders and other hard-to-reach experts for model evaluation, preference feedback and domain-specific data.
Our goal is to make high-quality professional insights accessible to every organization and to the AI systems they build.
The Role
We’re looking for a Director of Research Impact who combines deep research expertise with commercial and client-facing instincts and a strong interest in building products.
You’ll help customers translate business questions into thoughtful research programs, guide projects from initial design through final findings, and make sure the results lead to clear, useful recommendations. You should be as comfortable writing a questionnaire or interpreting results as you are leading a conversation with a prospective customer.
You’ll work closely with our sales team as a research partner throughout the sales process. That means helping customers understand what they could learn, recommending the right approach, and showing how Emporia can help them get there. You’ll bring the judgment and credibility of an experienced researcher to conversations where customers are still figuring out what they need.
You’ll also work directly with product and engineering to reimagine our research solutions. Your experience will help shape how these tools work together across our platform and connect with customers’ existing systems—from designing a study to making its findings useful.
This is a hands-on leadership role with the opportunity to influence the research we deliver, the org we build, the business we win, and the products we ship.
Responsibilities
Lead research from business question to business impact
- Work with customers to understand the decisions they need to make and define the research questions that will help answer them.
- Design quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method research programs, selecting the right approach for each customer’s goals, audience, timeline, and budget.
- Develop questionnaires, screeners, interview guides, and analysis plans that produce reliable, relevant findings.
- Guide projects through execution, working with delivery teams to maintain research quality and address issues as they arise.
- Analyze and synthesize results into clear narratives, practical recommendations, and presentations that help customers decide what to do next.
- Establish repeatable research practices and quality standards that help the broader team deliver excellent work.
Partner with sales and customers
- Join discovery calls and sales conversations as Emporia’s research expert, helping prospective customers move from a broad problem to a concrete research approach.
- Explain methodologies, tradeoffs, and expected outcomes in language that resonates with both experienced researchers and business stakeholders.
- Help shape proposals, scopes of work, and demonstrations that connect our capabilities to the customer’s specific needs.
- Identify opportunities for customers to answer additional business questions through research and work with sales to develop those opportunities.
- Equip the sales team with research examples, practical guidance, and the confidence to recognize when and how to bring research expertise into a conversation.
Shape our research products
- Partner with product and engineering to improve how customers design, launch, analyze, and act on research through Emporia.
- Help reimagine our survey tools and AI-moderated interviewer, bringing sound research principles into the product experience.
- Define how surveys and interviews can work together, including when to use each and how to combine their findings.
- Translate customer needs into clear product requirements, workflows, and priorities.
- Help define how research inputs and outputs connect with customer systems so insights become part of their everyday decision-making.
- Evaluate new capabilities against real research use cases, with attention to usability, methodological quality, and the usefulness of the resulting insights.
- Represent Emporia on stage at industry conferences and events, sharing the new research methodologies and approaches you help develop and showing how they improve research quality and business impact.
Who You Are
- Experience with B2B research, research technology platforms, AI-assisted research, or consultative sales would be especially valuable.
- An experienced, hands-on researcher. You’ve independently led complex research projects from scoping and instrument design through analysis and presentation. You can do the work yourself and help others do it well.
- Strong across research methods. You have deep survey design experience, sound quantitative judgment, and the ability to design and interpret qualitative research. You know which methods fit a question and where their limitations lie.
- A trusted client adviser. You’re comfortable working with senior stakeholders, asking thoughtful questions, challenging assumptions constructively, and explaining complex findings clearly.
- Commercially minded. You enjoy helping prospective customers understand what’s possible and are comfortable contributing directly to sales conversations, proposals, and solution design.
- A product-minded builder. You notice where research workflows break down and can work with product managers and engineers to turn those observations into better tools.
- Thoughtful about AI. You’re excited about its potential in research and bring good judgment about where it improves the experience, where it needs oversight, and how to evaluate its outputs.
- Comfortable with ambiguity. You can set direction, prioritize competing needs, and move work forward in a fast growing company.
- Focused on impact. You care about whether research changes a decision, improves a product, or helps a customer understand something important.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and stock options
- Healthcare, dental, and vision coverage
- PTO and regular company holidays
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Company retreats
- Austin headquarters with a hybrid and remote-friendly environment