Sr. Design Researcher, Geospatial & Utility Operations

**About Gridware** Gridware is a San Francisco-based technology company dedicated to protecting and enhancing the electrical grid. We pioneered a groundbreaking new class of grid management called active grid response (AGR), focused on monitoring the electrical, physical, and environmental aspects of the grid that affect reliability and safety. Gridware’s advanced Active Grid Response platform uses high-precision sensors to detect potential issues early, enabling proactive maintenance and fault mitigation. This comprehensive approach helps improve safety, reduce outages, and ensure the grid operates efficiently. The company is backed by climate-tech and Silicon Valley investors. For more information, please visit [www.Gridware.io](http://www.gridware.io/). **Role Description** This is Gridware's first dedicated design research role, and it is a foundational hire for our product organization. You will join a product designer and work in close partnership with product managers across multiple lanes. Your job is not to produce one-off research deliverables, but to build the research infrastructure that helps the entire team make better product decisions, faster. But this role is more than a UX researcher who runs studies and draws journey maps. The core question this role exists to answer is: *how do utility customers move from signal to evidence to decision to action — and what does Gridware need to build, surface, and externalize to support that chain reliably?* The team needs someone who can map how utility customers move from signal → evidence → decision → action, and then help us externalize that reasoning inside the product. Our users are domain experts making high-consequence decisions: operators, wildfire mitigation managers, vegetation managers, asset engineers, field crews, program owners, and executives. Each role has different decision rights, evidence needs, trust thresholds, failure modes, and reporting obligations. Understanding that decision landscape — the who, the goals, the motivations, and the value — is the heart of the job. You will need to move fluently between generative research and service design thinking. Running rigorous qualitative studies with expert users, while also mapping the systemic journeys that cut across product lanes and organizational boundaries will help keep the cross-functional teams grounded in what customers actually understand, decide, and do. ### Responsibilities - **Build decision-centered customer profiles**. Go beyond personas. Build profiles mapped to the actual decisions each utility role makes: what they decide, what evidence they need, which systems they trust, what actions they're authorized to take, and what happens when the product is wrong or unclear. These profiles ground product direction in operational reality, not demographics - **Map service design across the utility operating model**. Create the journey maps and service blueprints that span end-to-end utility workflows — hazard prevention strategies, grid monitoring, vegetation management, field response, escalation, reporting, and post-event review. Capture frontstage user actions alongside backstage Gridware processes, data dependencies, integrations, and handoffs. These artifacts show how users experience our products as one system, where the experience breaks down, where internal processes create friction, and where automation changes the human role. They are shared design infrastructure, not one-team documents - **Lead GIS and data-rich workflow research**. Study how expert users interpret maps, asset topology, imagery, weather and vegetation layers, telemetry, anomaly detection, confidence scores, and model-generated recommendations. You don't need to be a GIS analyst, but you need to be fluent enough to research spatial and data-heavy workflows without oversimplifying them, and understand: what users see, what they trust, where they are confused, and what the product must do to make complex multi-layer data…