Research Associate
US$100,000 – US$130,000 / yr base salary
Posted 2 Oct 2026
Advertised as “Sr. Research Associate”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 2–5 yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- Remote
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$100,000 – US$130,000 / yr |
|---|
Study levelBachelor's
About Us
We are a private design studio that builds and supports a portfolio of companies and projects across software, hardware, hospitality, and more. Some of what we build stays in house; some spins out. We also run an early-stage investment fund and an accompanying cohort program for founders. This company is not Expa, but is an affiliate of Expa's.
The Role
We're looking for a Senior Research Associate who can find out anything about anything. Leadership will come to you with questions — size this market, map the players in this category, who's funding what, what the landscape looks like for XYZ — and you'll come back with an answer that's clear, well-sourced, and actually useful.
Some weeks that means building a competitive matrix across 40 companies. Some weeks it means a deep dive into a single obscure question nobody has written about yet. The projects change, the subject matter changes, and the volume varies week to week.
You'll be exposed to a lot of different projects and ideas, and work directly with a highly accomplished leader and team. If you're the kind of person who reads everything, asks a lot of questions, and wants to be in the room with people operating at a very high level, this is built for you.
What You'll Do
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Run open-ended research projects using the internet as your primary tool: markets, products, companies, funding activity, competitive landscapes, people, technologies, regulation — whatever the question requires.
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Turn messy findings into clean outputs: matrices, comparison tables, briefs, landscape maps, one-pagers.
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Go deep enough to have a point of view, not just a link dump — flag what matters, what's uncertain, and what you'd look at next.
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Use AI tools aggressively to move faster and go wider than a person could alone.
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Build lightweight tools, scrapers, or trackers when a project calls for it.
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Juggle several unrelated requests at once and reprioritize when things shift.
What We're Looking For
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2–5 years of experience and a bachelor's degree — you take a task and run with it, but you've got the reps to produce senior-level output: quick turnaround, sharp judgment calls, and less hand-holding needed along the way.
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Brain power: sharp, curious, and able to reason through a question you've never seen before.
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AI-native: You live in AI tools — Claude and Cowork, ChatGPT, Gemini, Hugging Face, whatever's newest. Ideally you can vibe code your way to a working script or prototype without waiting on an engineer. Bonus points if you've hit your usage limit more than once.