Careers

At the Digital Safety Research Institute (DSRI) we help people keep themselves safe and secure from digital threats. Our grand challenge is “safety at the human-digital interface”. This means our first concern is always the people who use or interact with digital technologies. That’s why having an excellent UX Researcher join our team is so important. The UX Researcher will craft interfaces that turn digital privacy, security, and safe and responsible AI from abstract or hard-to-understand concepts into easily digestible information that drives positive behavior change.

As the User Experience Researcher, you will play a key role in the rapid growth of Underwriters Laboratories as you:

• Scope UX research projects, conducts experiments, and publishes results in peer-reviewed conference and journals, individually or as part of a research team.

• Contribute to user-centered design and design research balancing often competing user needs for ease of use, privacy, security, and performance.

• Work with other DSRI teams to conducts user interviews, usability testing, and surveys to gather qualitative and quantitative insights that will inform our work.

• Collaborate with team to develop user personas, user journeys, and other relevant documentation to guide design and development.

• Analyze user feedback and behavior data to provide actionable recommendations for developing and enhancing user experiences.

• Test and review content, perform quality assurance checks, and adjust as needed to ensure published content meets quality and performance criteria.

• Effectively facilitate design and product development processes with cross-functional teams, especially research and engineering teams.

• Create, update, and maintain wireframes, prototypes, and designs for a wide variety of public-facing and internal applications from websites to command-line interfaces.

• Has research ideas on how design can encourage users to better adopt more positive behaviors.

• Lead design and branding for DSRI projects (in accordance with UL Research Institutes branding) including open-source software, research initiatives across subject areas, and outreach and other communications projects.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

DSRI is looking for contract collaborators to help us build open science responsible AI assessments as part of a cross-disciplinary team of researchers. You will develop automated safety evaluations for systems built with large language models (LLMs) and other technologies more tailored for specific purposes. You will focus on systems that people will interact with regularly, and not the underlying models. Evaluations will become part of a larger process for the dynamic evaluation of digital systems.

We have three main requirements for the work:

1. Focus on tangible, observable risks (or benefits) that people may experience because of some system, whether indirectly or through direct use;

2. Produce evaluations with the properties of rigor, automated evaluation, reproducibility, and scale; and

3. Inform statements about system safety that are meaningful to non-experts.

This project will produce a concrete set of metrics to evaluate AI system safety and a means for the larger digital safety engineering community to improve upon them. You will be supported by a growing team of research engineers with infrastructure scaling your evaluations to a large number of systems.

We are seeking people to join us on this project as short-term contractors. People with experience in computational social science, data science, machine learning research, and related fields may be particularly interested in this opportunity. If this sounds like the right challenge for you, please contact [email protected] with a resume and a few digital system categories you are prepared to assess.