Lead User Researcher & Community Builder

Use your independence, communication skills, and curiosity to build trust, understand the difficulties facing underserved households, and help us pioneer a new kind of product design.

Our mission

Hugonauts work to make financial stability achievable for every American. We're starting with car insurance. 30 million Americans drive uninsured each year - risking major fines, impoundment / suspension, even jail.

We designed our flagship product, Hugo, to work for every driver. Hugo is radically simple - zero-down, zero-fee, and zero-contract - so drivers can buy coverage for the days they need, when they need them, keeping their money where it belongs... in their wallet.

How you'll contribute

By day 30, you’ll...

• Onboard with our leadership team to understand what we do, how, and why we do it that way - so that you’ll be able to contextualize criticism and help us grow
• Have spent time with our CEO to understand how we’ve generated community insights in the past
• Conducted user testing in the neighborhoods where we did our foundational research
• Developed your own research roadmap

By day 90, you’ll...

• Have your own trusted research touchpoints in underserved communities
• Have iterated on your research roadmap
• Have completed multiple user testing sessions and developed systems to quickly surface and socialize insights
• Collaborated to build the foundations of design operations, linking basic research with product implementation decisions

What will your team be like?

As a researcher, you’ll collaborate closely with high-leverage engineers and subject matter experts to solve problems for our members.

What does high-leverage mean? It means that your teammates don’t just understand how to collaborate and solve problems, but how to prioritize, make tradeoffs, and deliver. We don’t believe in “staying in your lane”, so your combined experience, curiosity, and knowledge will influence each other’s work and deliver something greater than the sum of its parts. That’s how we build better for our members.

What characteristics do we think are helpful (but not fixed requirements) for this role?

• Experience operating independently, self-starting, finding work-arounds
• Demonstrated ability to build trust and relationships in complicated environments
• Experience conducting ethnographic research, user research, and/or user testing with less accessible participants
• Demonstrated ability to take complex or nuanced information and rapidly distill it into actionable insights
• Spanish language proficiency
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

What values do we look for in every Hugonaut?

• You’re passionate about changing everyday lives by fixing a broken industry
• You want to move fast and make a big impact
• You value over-communication, rapid collaboration, and candid feedback
• You know perfection - and when not to pursue it
• You love identifying problems, developing hypotheses, quickly implementing well-structured experiments, and measuring the right outcomes
• You’re intolerant of laziness or sloppy thinking
• You believe in stepping-up / leaning-in / rolling up your sleeves
• You own mistakes, learn, and drive forward

Ace your application

• Excellent, colloquial Spanish - written and spoken
• Be able to talk through difficult research situations where it was hard to access participants, gain their trust, and surface insights -- and how you succeeded
• Have examples of dangerous or otherwise challenging environments you’ve worked in, and know what methods you used to stay safe
• Know what mistakes researchers often make, and how you avoid them (or, even better, your own lessons learned)