About Sandbox
At Sandbox, we’re on a mission to help people who don’t see eye to eye on politics help each other see what they’re missing. On our app, Sandboxers have structured, one-on-one political conversations. We’re reimagining civic life around a simple idea: acknowledging other perspectives is the way we start to repair what’s broken.

We’re looking for a Lead Researcher with deep expertise in social or political psychology to help us measure, understand, and improve the quality of political conversations on the platform. If you’re passionate about designing experiments that tackle real-world polarization and thrive in startup environments, we’d love to meet you.

What You’ll Do

• Design and lead experiments to evaluate the productivity and civility of political conversations on Sandbox

• Develop and apply models to assess the quality and epistemic value of participant-generated explanations and responses

• Track platform efficacy: Are better ideas rising to the top? Are users becoming more open, reflective, or dogmatic over time?

• Tell the story of each week’s topic, combining qualitative and quantitative insights to explain how people are thinking, where they acknowledge another perspective, and where they cannot

• Collaborate with product and engineering to turn findings into features

• Write up findings for internal stakeholders, external partners, and publication

What We’re Looking For

• Ph.D. in Social Psychology, Political Science, or related field

• Strong background in experimental design, survey research, psychometrics, and behavioral data analysis

• Clear communicator, skilled at translating research into actionable insights

• Startup-ready: proactive, flexible, and able to work independently

• Deep curiosity about human reasoning, disagreement, and belief formation

Nice to Have

• Fluency in R, SQL, and data visualization

• A Substack, blog, or track record of public communication on complex issues