About the job

Spark Wave conducts research projects and creates software products that are driven by our mission to build on and use our understanding of human psychology to improve the world.

In this role, you will be helping us provide an excellent experience to the users of our software, testing our products, catching bugs before our products are released, providing customer support to our users, and uncovering new ways to improve our products. To do this, you will need to master a variety of complex software products that we make.

What we offer in this role:

• An opportunity to work for a company aimed at doing social good, contributing to projects that we hope will help improve the world.
• A friendly work environment: we are kind to each other and treat each other with respect.
• The ability to meaningfully improve our products, so that our products do more good.
• Flexibility: this is a full-time position (roughly 30-45 hours per week), but you’ll be setting your own hours and will be able to flexibly take breaks throughout the day, as well as to plan and take holidays when you wish to do so. This is a work-from-home position (our entire team is remote), so anyone anywhere in the world is welcome to apply. There are no travel requirements for this position.
• Learning: to excel in this role, you must be able to become a master user of multiple complex software products and be able to explain their usage to others. No prior programming experience is required, but you will be learning some basic programming in our easy-to-learn “behavioral science language,” GuidedTrack.
• Independence: you’ll have a lot of autonomy in this role, though you will have people you can reach out to when you have questions or need help.
• Exposure to a wide range of products and teams: you’ll be remotely collaborating with various teams and software engineers across the range of software products for whom you’ll be providing customer support and quality assurance.

The pay for this position is $20 USD per hour.

Responsibilities of this role:

1. Customer support: providing both written (typically email-based) and (in rarer instances) real-time support to people who use any of a range of software products, potentially including:

• GuidedTrack, our social science platform that enables non-programmers to create behavioral interventions, surveys, online experiments, learning modules, apps, and interactive tools
• Positly, our study participant recruitment platform (support for which will likely include running online studies on behalf of some of our customers)
• Hypothesize, our statistics platform designed to help researchers draw valid conclusions from their data
• Mind Ease, our app for helping people with panic attacks
• Other apps and software tools we’ve created

2. Quality Assurance: helping us to improve and find bugs in our products, potentially including:

• Thoroughly testing our products before new releases to catch bugs before they impact our users, and carefully documenting the bugs so that our engineers can fix them
• Trying to break our software, testing edge cases
• Discovering ways our products could be improved

3. User Experience: helping us figure out how our products could better serve our users, through an understanding of user problems and goals. This potentially includes:

• Mocking up features in simple UX software
• Conducting customer interviews to help us learn more about their experiences with our products
• Identifying aspects of our products that may confuse or trip up users

Position requirements:

To thrive in this role, you will need to have:

• A willingness and aptitude for empathetically supporting a wide range of customers across our range of products (when a customer needs help, is having trouble with our products, or has a complaint)
• The meticulousness and detail orientation to carefully and systematically test products to find their bugs and weaknesses, and to clearly document these issues so that engineering can fix them
• The interest and capacity to deeply learn how our complex products work
• The ability to communicate clearly to our customers and our engineers via email
• A keen eye for noticing how products could be improved

Note that no prior customer support, user experience design, or quality assurance experience is required to apply to this role. What we care about is whether you will do an excellent job, not whether you have done the job before.

Although none of the following are required, we especially encourage you to apply if you:

• Are excited about contributing to accelerating social science and/or improving societal well-being
• Enjoy learning how to use a wide range of digital products
• Are able to imagine how users will interact with digital interfaces and what could go wrong for them
• Can empathize with a range of people in a range of emotional states
• Like the idea of working with a variety of different product teams on a variety of different products
• Are excited to learn some basic programming skills (including GuidedTrack programming and possibly SQL queries)
• Are excited to learn about how to conduct online studies (and potentially run some on behalf of customers)

Application information:

Applications are due by the end of the day (in any time zone), September 6, 2023.

Spark Wave is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all our staff, volunteers, subcontractors, vendors, and clients.

If you like, you can also learn more about our company here. If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at info@sparkwave.tech.

Thank you for your interest in this position! We look forward to hearing from you.

The Spark Wave Team