The Cognition Company is looking to appoint a Senior Associate (Experimental Methods)

In this role, you would be expected to support the Cognition Company’s expanding programme of online experiments. You will work in partnership with our data scientists, behavioural scientists and designers to help design, run, and report experiments, using an online sample of participants. 

A key part of this role will therefore be helping colleagues to coordinate their experimental work, and supporting them to develop their own skills. As well as helping to develop new experimental methods that can be used by the team and the companies we work with. 

You will act as the point person for the online participant panels that we work with, so that they have a single person to liaise with about sample sizes, costs, and timeframes for new projects. 

You will report to the Director for Behavioural Design-Making, but will work flexibly with everyone at the Cognition Company.

The successful candidate(s) will have an excellent knowledge of experimental and statistical methods. Some examples of work you might be asked to support include (though we don’t expect a single candidate to necessarily be able to do all of the following things): 

• Design online experiments in softwares like Qualtrics to allow us to carry out exploratory research. For example:

  • Running choice experiments to see how users weigh different attributes of a choice, or

  • Running survey experiments to see whether presenting information in different ways influences what user ends up choosing, or

  • Running simulation experiments to test whether including a new function on an app home screen increases sign-up rates

• Undertaking power calculations in order to determine what sample size might be required to run an experiment through that platform or app

• Advising on ways of randomising a population sample in order to conduct an online experiment

• Run statistical tests and analyses on the data generated via experiments to determine what worked and what didn’t

• Develop and oversee adoption of standard procedures and policies across Cognition Company on running online experiments to ensure quality control

Skills and Experience

All candidates must be able to demonstrate the following:

• Strong academic background in a relevant discipline (e.g. a Masters or PhD in statistics, psychology, behavioural science or field involving strong use of experimental methods)

• Strong experience working on the design and running of online experiments (e.g. in a university lab or corporate setting)

• Ability to use relevant software packages for the designing, running and analysis of experiments (e.g. Qualtrics and R). 

• Good project management skills

• Excellent team player

• Ability to deliver high quality work to a tight deadline, feeding into the wider work being undertaken as part of a team

Desirable but not essential:

• Good understanding of behavioural science literature

• Experience of having worked as part of a multidisciplinary team