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Breakout Ventures · 2 months ago

Member of the Technical Staff - Product

Cambridge, MA

Full-time

Hybrid

Mid, Senior Level

Breakout Ventures is focused on leveraging AI to enhance the transfer of scientific innovations to real-world applications. They are looking for a Member of the Technical Staff - Product to lead research efforts, translate insights into product requirements, and develop tools that improve scientific workflows.

Advanced MaterialsEnergyFinancial ServicesLife ScienceVenture Capital

Responsibilities

Lead qualitative and quantitative research efforts to understand user workflows, pain points, and tacit practices—both in our internal labs and those of our partners

Translate messy, real-world insights into structured requirements that drive product design, system architecture, and AI model development

Develop user personas, journey maps, and usability testing frameworks to inform iterative product development cycles

Bring cross-functional initiatives from concept to delivery. Establish milestones, communication cadences, and decision-making frameworks

Become customer obsessed. Initiate, support, and lead program execution with external partners and collaborators to capture, document, and deliver results

Develop intuitive, usable tools and UIs in partnership with the engineering team to support scientist workflows

Partner with scientists, engineers, and designers to prototype and evaluate interfaces and tools that improve documentation, decision-making, and experimental reproducibility

Help define and implement product standards for usability, accessibility, and cross-platform cohesion across the experimental ecosystem

Identify opportunities to reduce friction in data capture, tacit knowledge transfer, and human-AI collaboration

Support customer deployments by embedding into partner labs, piloting new workflows, troubleshooting edge cases, and capturing lessons learned

Support onboarding and training with customer-embedded scientists to ensure product adoption and feedback loops are tight and actionable

Qualification

Human-Computer InteractionUX ResearchProduct DesignPrototypingAI/ML Product DevelopmentScientific InstrumentationCommunicationCollaboration Skills

Required

Experience in human-computer interaction (HCI), cognitive science, UX research, product design, or a related field

Demonstrated ability to turn ideas into functional prototypes. Ability to build quickly, test often, and refine thoughtfully—balancing prototypes with production quality as the company scales

Demonstrated ability to lead user research and synthesize findings into actionable design or product decisions—especially in complex or technical domains

Experience designing or improving tools for expert users, particularly in scientific, technical, or data-intensive environments

Comfort working at the intersection of product, engineering, and domain-specific users (e.g., bench scientists, ML researchers)

Excellent communication and storytelling skills—able to advocate for customer needs while navigating technical and strategic constraints