Principal Measurement Scientist (PhD)

Recon Analytics Data, Inc.

The Mission

Recon Analytics is redefining speed and fidelity in telecom and technology intelligence. We are seeking a Principal Measurement Scientist to help us develop new product and services with even greater statistical and methodological rigor. You won't just analyze numbers; you will help define the science behind how we measure consumer behavior across different markets from telecom, AI, airlines to financial services.

This is a "builder" role. You will bridge the gap between academic psychometrics and modern, high-performance data engineering, transforming raw data into sophisticated, validated products that set new industry standards.

We are the standard dataset and decision engine the telecommunications industry relies on to make strategic decisions. Our platform is built on one of the largest private datasets in the world, capturing in detail how and why consumers make purchase decisions. In addition, we operate the largest dataset on AI usage globally, with insights from more than 200,000 respondents explaining not only how people use AI, but why they adopt it, hesitate, or abandon it altogether.

Key Responsibilities

• Methodological Architecture: Design and validate the "Pulse" frameworks for new industries and geographies to ensure cross-market comparability and longitudinal reliability.
• Product Innovation: Work with the product team to turn raw survey data into proprietary indices and benchmarks by applying advanced psychometric scaling.
• AI-Augmented Research: Architect agentic workflows that use LLMs to categorize and synthesize massive datasets, ensuring AI-driven insights meet strict validity standards.
• Synthetic Respondents: Help further refine our innovative breakthrough approach to creating synthetic respondents.
• AI Decision Making Framework: Help implement and improve our market winning AI solutions that model and predict market participant behaviors.
• Subject Matter Leadership: Serve as the ultimate arbiter of statistical truth, ensuring our velocity never compromises the measurement validity our clients expect.

Required Qualifications

• Education: PhD in a quantitative field such as Psychometrics, Quantitative Psychology, Econometrics, Statistics, or a related social science field with a heavy emphasis on measurement.
• Measurement Expertise: Deep understanding of Classical Test Theory (CTT), Item Response Theory (IRT), and Causal Inference.
• Technical Proficiency: * Expert-level SQL (familiarity with DuckDB is a major plus).
• Proficiency in R or Python for heavy-duty statistical modeling.
• Experience designing production-ready logic for Tableau.
• AI Fluency: Experience or strong interest in using frontier and open-source AI models for data extraction, synthetic sampling, or research automation.
• Experience: 3–5+ years in a commercial environment (e.g., Nielsen, Kantar, or a tech-heavy research firm) is highly preferred.

Why Recon Analytics?

At legacy giants, a PhD might spend months debating a single weighting change. At Recon Analytics we differentiate on:

1. Speed: We move at the speed of the market, not at the speed of academia. We anticipate the needs of the clients so that we have answers before our clients have articulated their questions. Our decision cycles and deadlines are measured in days, not weeks or months. When we need data to model a new development we provide in less than a week.
2. Innovation: You aren't maintaining a 30-year-old model; you are building the future of Computational Psychometrics. We are married to the future, not the past. What we do today has to be better than what we did yesterday and is not good enough for tomorrow.
3. Impact: Your work directly informs the strategy of the world's largest telecom and technology companies at the C-suite level.

Compensation

Base salary: $180,000–$210,000

Annual bonus: Target 25% of base.

Equity: Stock options representing 0.1% of the company.

Benefits: Fully remote within the United States; 100% employer‑paid health insurance (medical, dental, vision); 401(k) with employer contribution; unlimited PTO with a 10 days required; and support for conferences and continued research activity.