The company
Prolific (www.prolific.ac)
brings people together to power the world’s research. It is the first
scientific, highly scalable, ethical participant recruitment platform
for researchers around the world. Quantitative and qualitative
researchers, data scientists, and entrepreneurs all need valid and
reliable data sources to make predictions about human behaviour, social
change, and global developments. Thanks to our online platform,
researchers collect responses fast and participants earn cash rewards
for themselves or for charity. It takes 5 minutes to start data
collection, there's no middleman, and the product easily integrates with
any survey software. In a world of unreliable results, Prolific makes
data trustworthy and connects the public with science.
The role
In this role you will develop and implement data analyses, data
collection systems, and other strategies that help us better understand
user behaviour as well as our business and product performance. You will
be analysing data using statistical techniques with a focus on
understanding our growth engine, users’ full life cycle, data quality,
and user demographics (for representative sampling): How does Prolific
currently acquire, convert, and retain its users (both Researchers and
Participants)? And what can be done to improve user acquisition,
conversion, and retention? What are the current demographics of the
pool, and what differences are there to the general population? Which
participants are the most honest and engaged, and which are not?
You will have an opportunity to learn about the startup ecosystem,
about the lean startup approach, and about user acquisition techniques
and growth strategies. More broadly, you will get the chance to learn
about business and product development, data science, and diverse
research areas in the social and natural sciences.
This is your chance to get involved in a fast-moving startup where
you’ll have huge influence over the trajectory of the product. Since
it’s a startup, you’ll have the opportunity to suggest how you can best
add value, and make any recommendations about improving the processes
and product. We're a fast-growing company and we want to help you grow
with us.
Working closely with our analysis team, developers and leadership you will work towards these key goals:
- Analyse what drives the growth of our platform and what is the best allocation of resources in order to improve this growth
- Improve the quality, the honesty, and engagement of
Prolific’s participant pool through analysis of user behaviour and
collection of new data
- Improve the diversity and representativeness of Prolific’s participant pool by ongoing monitoring of demographics
This will likely involve some or all of the following:
- Analyse key growth metrics, retention, stickiness, churn over
time and determine causal links between product changes and growth.
Work closely with management and use these data to influence key
decisions and help our startup grow quickly
- Use analytics
software such as Amplitude to create visualisations, segment our
user base, and develop dashboards to track key growth, data
quality, and demographic metrics over time
- Develop a clear understanding of our community and intersect
this qualitative data with quantitative data and develop a plan of
key questions to answer with data
- Extract data from non-SQL/SQL databases for analyses in a
reproducible way for downstream analysis or work closely with
developers in order to achieve this
- Statistically analyse large data sets (millions of rows) and
draw robust conclusions from these data with the understanding that
large data sets are messy, and it is easy to draw incorrect
conclusions from these data if our analyses are not robust
- Develop attention checks, consistency checks and longitudinal
measures designed to track participants’ consistency, honesty, and
engagement
- Proactively suggest new questions to ask, new data to collect, or product changes to make based on insights from data
- Generate regular reports in a reproducible manner which
clearly and accurately describe the collection, organisation, and
analysis of your data
- Disseminate the key information to the whole organisation in
written reports and summaries, which highlight the key insights
you’ve gained and which are easily interpretable and actionable
Benefits
- Salary: £28,000-32,000 (p.a.), negotiable based on experience and qualifications, plus:
- Pension (employer contribution 3% of base salary)
- Flexible working: Work equipment of your choice, you can work flexibly from home or from our coworking space, flexible hours
- 25 days holiday per year, plus bank holidays
- Flexible budget for any books and/or educational material
- Personal growth opportunities (e.g., learn about the startup
ecosystem, mentoring from executive team, learn about psychological
science and research methods)
- Open, transparent, and inclusive culture
- Self-made cider and home-baked cookies :-)
How we interview & hire
Our hiring process usually begins with an introductory online
interview to help you get to know us better, and vice versa. At this
stage, we would like to better understand your motivation for the role,
get to know about your interests and personality, and learn about any
relevant past experience or skills you might have. If this initial
interview is successful, we'd then invite you to complete an assignment
(<2 hours, you'll be compensated for the time spent), which will be
reviewed by one of our engineers. This will be followed by an in-depth,
face-to-face interview in Oxford, UK, with the key people in our startup
(CEO Katia, CTO Phelim, and COO Jim), which will provide an opportunity
to discuss the assignment, explore value fit, which incentives you care
about, and learn how you would work with the team on a daily basis.
What’s it like to work at Prolific?
Our core values:
Curiosity and openness: We like to think big, ask creative questions, and tackle difficult challenges
Transparency and honesty: We care about constructive debate and having transparent, democratic processes
Striving for excellence: We continuously seek to improve in all areas, but make sure we stay lean
Doing good: We care about research and want to empower scientists and companies to be more data-driven
You’ll be joining an enthusiastic team of eight based in Oxford, UK
(although two of us work remotely, in Glasgow and Newcastle).
