Audio UX Researcher

The client's team brings together a world-class team of researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of virtual and augmented reality, which together will become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal computers are today. Just as personal computers have done over the past 45 years, AR will ultimately change everything about how we work, play, and connect. We are developing all the technologies needed to enable breakthrough AR glasses, including optics and displays, computer vision, audio, graphics, brain-computer interfaces, haptic interaction, eye/hand/face/body tracking, perception science, and true telepresence.

In particular, the RLR Audio team is focused on two goals: creating virtual sounds that are perceptually indistinguishable from reality, and redefining human hearing. These two initiatives will allow us to connect people by allowing them to feel together despite being physically apart, and allow them to converse in even the most difficult listening environments.

We are seeking a contract UX Researcher III to support an ambitious new project; advancing client's Superhuman Communication & Connection initiative. This role is embedded in a fast-moving prototyping effort where the system itself changes week to week. We need someone who can sit in on demos and working sessions, absorb scattered feedback (what's clicking, what's confusing, what feels off), and synthesize it into concise, actionable insights on a timescale that keeps pace with development.

The core of this role is lightweight qualitative evaluation. We need someone whose primary strength is qualitative research, structured observation, conversational interviewing, rapid thematic synthesis, and the interpretive judgment to surface what matters from informal feedback.

Quantitative methods supplement the work occasionally, but the initial day-to-day demand is for a researcher who thinks in narratives, patterns, and human reactions rather than sample sizes and statistical significance.

Because many of the core questions revolve around where and how received audio is rendered in space, this role calls for a researcher who can reason fluently about spatial audio and auditory perception, not just general UX method. The qualitative work here is fundamentally about how people perceive and locate sound.

This is not a role for elaborately planned, months-out user studies. What we need is rapid, lightweight qualitative assessment: structured listening, quick-turn synthesis, and the judgment to know which signals matter so the team can course-correct in real time. Think short evaluative sessions with a handful of participants, heuristic walkthroughs of new interaction patterns, and same-week write-ups that land while the design questions are still live.

The ideal candidate treats the prototype as a living thing and their research as a conversation with it; not an audit of it. They are comfortable forming a qualitative read on an experience after a small number of well-chosen observations, and they know how to frame findings in ways that move a team forward without waiting for statistical confidence. An ideal candidate would have familiarity with some or all of the following areas:

• Speech communication and human-AI interaction
• Audio signal processing or hearing sciences
• Wearable technology (AI glasses, headphones, smart watches)
• Rapid iterative design and prototyping environments
• Qualitative research in applied product or research settings

• Embed in the prototyping team and conduct rapid, lightweight qualitative research to guide the development of novel AI glasses user experiences focused on speech communication and effortless conversation
• Attend demos, working sessions, and design reviews;…