Job Description
Hive Science is a tech start-up whose technologies are in use by many of the world’s largest brands including Land Rover, Edward Jones & numerous other fortune 500 brands. The Hive platform is delivering novel intelligence at the intersection of quantitative social psychology, behavioral science & AI/ML to accelerate & transform how work is done. We’re looking for someone to join our team and get on board this rocket ship with us.
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About the role:
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Design and scale experimentation
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- Design rigorous experiments for Hive products, including holdouts, back-tests, and A/B, geo and incrementality tests with customers and partners.
- Build repeatable experimentation frameworks, so each new product or partner can be tested quickly and consistently.
- Maintain and extend Hive's validation standards, covering out-of-sample performance, calibration, stability and uncertainty.
- Work with Hive's scientists to keep results scientifically meaningful as well as statistically significant.
- Help set the scientific bar for when a product is ready to ship.
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Work with real-world campaign and media data
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- Analyze campaign performance data such as impressions, reach, frequency, CTR, conversions, CPA and ROAS.
- Design tests that account for how ad platforms actually work: auction dynamics, delivery optimization, pacing, audience overlap, and non-random delivery that can confound naive comparisons.
- Work with large, messy real-world datasets, and know which questions the data can and can't answer.
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Make it commercially useful
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- Design experiments that answer the questions customers, partners and procurement teams actually ask.
- Turn results into case studies, benchmarks and proof points for commercial teams.
- Make pragmatic tradeoffs among rigor, cost, speed and what's feasible in live campaigns.
- Work with Product to prioritize the experimental work that most strengthens Hive's differentiation.
- Communicate assumptions, uncertainty and limitations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
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Use AI as a force multiplier
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- Use Claude Code and other AI tools daily to accelerate coding, analysis, diagnostics and documentation.
- Independently validate AI-generated code, assumptions and interpretations, and help set team standards for reproducible AI-assisted science.
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Requirements:
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- Exceptional experimental design skills. You've designed and run many experiments, in the field and in live commercial settings, and know how to get clean answers from messy real-world conditions.
- Deep expertise in causal inference, including randomized experiments, quasi-experimental methods and incrementality measurement.
- Hands-on experience with advertising and campaign data: impressions, CTR, conversions, CPA, ROAS, attribution and lift measurement.
- A working understanding of how ad platforms and delivery algorithms behave (auctions, optimization, pacing, targeting) and how they bias experimental results.
- Commercial experience in ad tech, marketing measurement, media, consumer intelligence, market research or consumer-facing products.
- Strong experience validating predictive or modeled data: calibration, generalization, uncertainty and bias.
- Advanced quantitative training (PhD or equivalent experience) in a field such as social or quantitative psychology, computational social science, statistics, economics, quantitative marketing or a related discipline.
- An instinct for the difference between a model that predicts well and one whose outputs mean what they claim to.
- Experience with geographic and multilevel data is a plus.
- Strong coding in Python and/or R, with comfort working directly with large datasets.
- Fluency with Claude Code, including an understanding of AI failure modes and how to verify output.
- The ability to explain complex methods simply and persuasively to commercial audiences.
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Backgrounds that could be a strong fit:
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We care more about experimental rigor, commercial judgment and creativity than about a specific discipline. Strong candidates might come from marketing science, ad measurement, experimentation teams at ad platforms or tech companies, media agencies, behavioral science, quantitative social science, or economics/econometrics.
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Additional Information:
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- Location: Hybrid, 3 days a week in our Durham office. You must live within commuting distance.
- Employment type: Full-time.
- Work authorization: You must have an existing right to work in the US. We're not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
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Please apply directly on the Hive website: https://www.hivescience.ai/careers/social-scientist-performance-durham-…