Design Researcher, Geospatial & Utility Operations

Role Description
This is Gridware's first dedicated design research role, and it is a foundational hire for our product organization.

You will join a product designer and work in close partnership with product managers across multiple lanes. Your job is not to produce one-off research deliverables, but to build the research infrastructure that helps the entire team make better product decisions, faster.
But this role is more than a UX researcher who runs studies and draws journey maps. The core question this role exists to answer is: how do utility customers move from signal to evidence to decision to action — and what does Gridware need to build, surface, and externalize to support that chain reliably?

The team needs someone who can map how utility customers move from signal → evidence → decision → action, and then help us externalize that reasoning inside the product. Our users are domain experts making high-consequence decisions: operators, wildfire mitigation managers, vegetation managers, asset engineers, field crews, program owners, and executives. Each role has different decision rights, evidence needs, trust thresholds, failure modes, and reporting obligations. Understanding that decision landscape — the who, the goals, the motivations, and the value — is the heart of the job.

You will need to move fluently between generative research and service design thinking. Running rigorous qualitative studies with expert users, while also mapping the systemic journeys that cut across product lanes and organizational boundaries will help keep the cross-functional teams grounded in what customers actually understand, decide, and do.