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Sr. Design Researcher, Geospatial & Utility Operations
San Francisco, CA$160K - $175KPosted 2 days ago
Full-timehybrid
Job Description
About Gridware
Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.Gridware.io.
Role Description
This is Gridware's first dedicated design research role, and it is a foundational hire for our product organization.
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?
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.
Role Description
This is Gridware's first dedicated design research role, and it is a foundational hire for our product organization.
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?
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.
About Gridware
Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit www.Gridware.io.
What Makes This Role Distinct
This is not a research role attached to a single product team. You're working across Gridware's entire product ecosystem — Monitoring, Fleet, Field Software, Data Platform, Pole Health, and what comes next. The north star is a unified Gridware experience, where operators, analysts, field crews, utility partners, and customers experience Gridware as one connected product system even when the underlying work spans multiple lanes.**At this time, Gridware is unable to provide visa sponsorship or immigration support for this role. We’re only able to consider candidates who are currently authorized to work in the country of employment without visa sponsorship now or in the future.**
This describes the ideal candidate; many of us have picked up this expertise along the way. Even if you meet only part of this list, we encourage you to apply!
Benefits
Health, Dental & Vision (Gold and Platinum with some providers plans fully covered)
Paid parental leave
Alternating day off (every other Monday)
“Off the Grid”, a two week per year paid break for all employees.
Commuter allowance
Company-paid training