[Hiring] Senior Occupational Psychologist @Spotted Zebra

Role Description

As our Senior Occupational Psychologist (Product & Skills Science), you'll help define what assessment looks like in an AI-native world. AI is changing how candidates are assessed, from conversational AI interviews to scoring that learns from real hiring outcomes. You'll be the scientific expert making sure that shift is built on sound occupational psychology. This is a senior individual contributor role for a deep specialist who wants to turn skills science into products that change how the world hires.

You'll work directly with our Co-Founder, Nick Shaw, to set the scientific direction for our assessments. You'll define the principles behind them and work with our Data Science team to turn them into scalable, data-driven products. You'll champion rigorous, evidence-led approaches so our assessments are fair, predictive and effective at launch, and so they keep improving as they learn from more data.

Success in this role means combining scientific rigour with curiosity, pragmatism and a bias for action, and building new forms of assessment that stand up to scrutiny and deliver results in the real world.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape the scientific foundations of a new generation of assessments, owning the skills science principles that determine what we measure and how we uncover the signals that matter.
• Pioneer new approaches to AI-powered assessment, from conversational interviews to adaptive formats, turning promising ideas into practical pilots and testing what works.
• Set the standard for intelligent scoring, defining strong and weak performance and creating golden examples and benchmarks to evaluate both candidates and our AI.
• Partner with our Data Science team to design evaluations that connect technical performance with sound psychological judgement, helping turn scientific principles into effective AI scoring.
• Build the evidence behind assessment innovation, leading ongoing validation to demonstrate reliability, fairness and predictive power as our products evolve.
• Make the science behind our products clear and credible through rigorous technical reports and manuals that give our teams and clients confidence in the results.
• Turn assessment data into product breakthroughs, using statistical analysis to uncover insights and translate them into better assessment design and scoring.
• Bring our science to life with clients, supporting validation and research alongside colleagues across the business to show how our assessments perform in the real world.

Qualifications

• A background in occupational or organisational psychology, with deep expertise in psychometrics and assessment design.
• Hands-on experience developing assessments such as situational judgement tests, personality measures or ability tests, ideally in an R&D environment.
• Proven validation experience: producing technical manuals or detailed validation reports that show an assessment’s reliability, fairness and predictive validity.
• Strong statistical and analytical skills, with experience using SPSS or similar statistical packages.
• Experience defining performance standards and building scoring frameworks or benchmarks.
• Startup or scale-up experience, and comfort with pace, ambiguity and changing priorities.
• An open-minded, solution-focused approach to AI in assessment: you look for ways to make new approaches work rather than reasons they can’t.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with AI-enabled assessment, such as AI-scored interviews, automated scoring or other AI-driven assessment methods.
• Experience using Python or AI coding tools for analysis and validation work.
• Experience designing in-person assessment centres or exercises.
• Experience writing technical manuals or documenting assessments.
• Experience working closely with data scientists, engineers or product teams.
• Familiarity with evaluation methods for AI or machine learning systems.
• Chartered status with the BPS and/or HCPC registration as an Occupational Psychologist.

Benefits

• Meaningful share options.
• Health insurance.
• Enhanced pension.
• Nursery salary sacrifice scheme.
• 25 days holiday (excluding bank holidays).
• Remote-first.
• Work from home budget.
• L&D budget.
• Dental cover.
• Eye-care support.
• Co-working space budget.
• Wellbeing allowance.
• Travel insurance.
• Electric car scheme.

Company Description

At Spotted Zebra, we're building an AI-native end-to-end hiring platform that helps the world's leading organisations find the right people, faster and fairer than ever before. We're a multi-award-winning Series A company giving talent leaders the solution they've always needed.

Our product is only part of the story. We're also building an AI-native company that helps us move faster, stay closer to customers and give talented people more leverage in their roles. Joining Spotted Zebra is a chance to shape what the future of work looks like inside a scaling company.

We are committed to providing equal opportunities and an inclusive and diverse culture. We believe that each and every one of us possesses an extraordinary set of skills and abilities, waiting to be discovered, nurtured, and harnessed for the benefit of all.