Job Description for Applied Research Scientist [Machine Visibility]

Company

Prerender (part of saas.group)

Location

Remote, Europe (EU timezone overlap preferred)

Role Overview

• First dedicated researcher at Prerender, working directly with the CEO.
• Build the research function and infrastructure from scratch.
• Study a unique dataset of billions of rendered pages and crawl data across dozens of bot types.
• Define and advance the new discipline of "machine visibility" — ensuring websites are accessible to automated systems like crawlers, AI bots, and autonomous agents.

Key Responsibilities

Build the Research Infrastructure

• Organize, clean, and structure existing data for systematic analysis.
• Design and build new data collection streams.
• Create a foundation for ongoing original research.

Conduct and Publish Original Research

• Design and execute studies using Prerender's data and web-scale datasets.
• Own full research lifecycle: question framing, methodology, analysis, findings.
• Produce work from quick data snapshots to in-depth flagship studies published under your name.
• Develop expertise profiling crawler behavior by bot type and maintaining a behavioral taxonomy of bots (e.g., GPTBot, ClaudeBot).
• Track changes in bot documentation, LLMs.txt adoption, schema evolution, and published research.
• Use AI both as a subject of research and as a tool to accelerate analysis.

Inform Business Decisions

• Provide data-driven insights to Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and leadership teams.
• Replace assumptions with evidence to guide company strategy.

Research Questions to Explore

• Behavior differences between AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot versus traditional crawlers.
• Predictors of page visibility to LLMs versus traditional search crawlers.
• Evolution of web-crawling bots ecosystem and its impact on web development.
• Defining "machine-readable" in the context of large language models.

Candidate Profile

Who You Are

• Rigorous and deeply curious about research accuracy.
• Technically self-sufficient: experience building data pipelines and handling messy datasets.
• Independent worker who sets own agenda.
• Clear writer able to communicate complex findings simply.
• Honest in following data wherever it leads.

Required Qualifications

• Published original research with full lifecycle experience (hypothesis to conclusions).
• Hands-on large-scale data analysis proficiency (SQL and Python).
• Strong experiment design skills including hypothesis formulation and statistical validation.
• Experience building data infrastructure beyond just analyzing datasets.
• Comfortable using AI tools in research workflows.

Nice to Have

• Experience observing AI crawler behavior in production environments.
• Technical SEO knowledge (crawlability, rendering, indexing, structured data).
• Familiarity with Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
• Public speaking or publications on machine visibility topics.
• Background in information retrieval or natural language processing (NLP).

Benefits & Perks

• Access to a unique dataset no one else has: billions of pages across dozens of bot types.
• Full ownership over research definition including infrastructure, methods, output.
• Published work under your name recognized by industry peers.
• Direct collaboration with CEO shaping research agenda.
• Structured onboarding roadmap with clear success metrics.
• Opportunity to build reputation with deep expertise in a growing field.
• Health coverage, flexible time off, tax optimized allowances.
• Learning budget for conferences, courses, tools.

Company Overview - saas.group

A global SaaS portfolio company founded in 2017 with 380+ remote colleagues across 50+ countries. Focused on acquiring and growing promising B2B SaaS ventures. Emphasizes diversity, inclusion, innovation, excellence.