Senior Researcher

Ad Hoc is a technology company that empowers organizations to deliver scalable, impactful digital services. Using modern, agile methods, our team creates products that meet people’s needs and transform their experience of government.

Our collaborations have shaped some of the defining moments in public-sector service delivery. We’ve helped build products that connect Veterans to tailored services, help millions access affordable health care, and support important programs like Head Start. As we work with agencies to deliver critical services, we’re also changing how the government approaches technology.

Our culture, communications, and tools are built for remote work, enabling us to bring together top talent nationwide. At Ad Hoc, remote life empowers our teams to design work environments that fit their lives and that foster flexibility and collaboration to achieve positive outcomes for our customers.

Ad Hoc values acceptance, accountability, and humility. We aren’t heroes. We learn from our mistakes and improve the process for the next time. We build small, inclusive teams to collaborate closely with our partners to solve the right problems and deliver software that works.

The Federal Civilian business unit supports many customers spanning the federal, commercial, and nonprofit space. Our customers include NASA, the General Services Administration, Office of Personnel Management, the Library of Congress, Health & Human Services, and the FDIC. We partner with these agencies to build new capabilities, deliver products, establish data as a strategic asset for informed decision-making, modernize legacy systems, and build the digital service infrastructure necessary to scale their mission impact.

Senior Researcher serves as an experienced individual contributor within a team, with the expectation that you will further develop your leadership, guidance and mentoring skills. With minimal oversight from leadership, you will be responsible for supporting the goal of meeting scope, schedule and delivery requirements. A Senior Researcher impacts the long-term goals of the program, while contributing to the development of the program’s research strategy. You may serve as the discipline’s primary lead when working with stakeholders and utilize strong influential skills to drive improvements in research processes and practices. Primary expectations of a Senior Researcher include:

• →Strong influential skills to build relationships with team members, government and company stakeholders, and program management
• →Leads cross functional efforts for team members and team leads
• →Navigates ambiguous requirements and environments to support delivery
• →Plans, conducts, analyzes, and shares knowledge from research based on the team’s questions and goals
• →Prioritizes research projects based on team needs and goals, balancing research team capacity
• →Plans and facilitates collaboration between researchers, product team members, and stakeholders
• →Influences and communicates research strategy for the program
• →Demonstrates the ability to coach and mentor researchers, with a focus on providing actionable feedback that helps individuals grow within the research discipline
• →Participates in grading candidate homework and participating in panel interviews
• →Ability to identify risks and communicate to leadership; provides recommendations to mitigate identified risks
• →Oversees research scope and the development of recommendations; leads efforts to effectively communicates results to internal and external stakeholders
• →Contributes to planning, conducting and synthesizing research

• Bachelor’s degree and 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Relevant professional experience may be substituted for education where permitted.
• Prior experience serving as a mentor to junior level team members
• Extensive experience with research principles and relevant technologies, understands roles with which they interact and how their work impacts business goals

• Experience with design software such as Figma, Miro, Adobe or other designer tools
• Experience with research principles and relevant technologies, understands roles with which they interact and how their work impacts business goals
• Familiarity with Google Analytics, Domo or Datadog
• Experience with QA, in particular checking products during the launch process to ensure the products we've built meet the user expectations and designs originally provided
• Strong mixed-methods research experience across discovery, evaluative research, interviews, usability testing, surveys, etc.
• Strong synthesis skills and an ability to translate findings into practical recommendations
• Comfortable working independently across multiple product teams and with CMS stakeholders
• Able to work in complex/technical spaces; experience with developer-facing products or APIs would be a plus given FHIR
• Some design experience or fluency - not a 50/50 researcher/designer, but enough to understand design constraints, collaborate closely with designers, provide meaningful design feedback, and help connect research findings to potential solutions. I’d think of it as roughly 90% research / 10% design
• Strong communication and facilitation skills