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.

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