About You

You want to use your skills to address climate change. You’d be excited to work in a dynamic, friendly, fast-growing startup. You’re a midweight-senior researcher with at least five years’ experience, some of it in a B2B SaaS environment, and you welcome the responsibility of shaping the direction of a pre-seed startup product. Sounds like you? Read on…

About Us

Optiml is fast-growing startup with a mission to decarbonise real estate as “the trusted software provider for sustainable and profitable real estate portfolios”. We spun out of ETH Zurich in fall 2022 and raised our $1.6m pre-seed from top-notch US & EU funds: Innovation Endeavors (San Francisco – fund of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt) and Planet A (Berlin). In short: although we’re only a year old we’re getting a lot of interest, and we’re at the stage where we need a senior designer to shape the future of our product.

Our product is B2B SaaS software, providing analytics and advice to guide our users’ organizations towards more sustainable outcomes. Our problem space sits at the intersection of complex systems, analytics, optimisation guidance and human decision-making. To be successful, we need to clearly and insightfully present complicated information to users, in a way that they can act on… and this is where we need your help!

Tasks

This role works with both our Product/Design and Business teams

• Collaborate with colleagues across the organization to develop a better understanding of users’ needs and experiences.
• Support the development outstanding product experiences, and a go-to-market strategy that enables Optiml to succeed with customers.
• Identify user needs, product requirements and take part in translating them into storyboards, user journeys, wireframes, low and high-fidelity mockups, and prototypes
• Continuous discovery and iteration to improve the user experience including running experiments with product analytics
• Help guide the end-to-end product design process for the lifecycle of products and features, from user research, to conceptualization, to launch, to product iteration
• Communicate findings to stakeholders, in order to influence decision-making based on understanding of the user and customer experience.
• Instill understanding of users across the Optiml team, ensuring that all colleagues feel engaged and inspired.
  
  
  

Requirements

Must have

• 5+ years’ experience in UX research, ideally including some experience in a SaaS environment, working with data visualization, and / or a startup.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Sociology, Information Science, or other relevant field.
• You are capable and self-sufficient across a range of methodologies, particularly user interviews, usability testing, surveys and the analysis of product / marketing analytics.
• You can identify what research is needed, run projects (including participant recruitment), bring colleagues on the journey and distill what you’ve learned into meaningful, actionable findings and recommendations.
• You’re focused above all on the impact your research can have, not just the process. You have the judgment to know when to prioritize scrappy over rigorous, and vice versa.
• You can devise, lead and execute on research ops, including participant recruitment / panels, remote research tools (e.g. Hotjar) and data storage.
• You have worked on complex B2B user journeys, ideally in an enterprise domain.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English and German.
• Swiss or EU citizenship (unfortunately due to size, we can’t support non-EU… yet).
  
  
  

Advantageous to have

• Experience of working on leading-edge analytics products.
• Experience of market and/or marketing research.
• Familiarity with the building / real estate industry.
• Experience working with generative AI and / or LLMs.
• Content design and writing skills.
• French language.
  
  
  

Who We Are Looking For

• You’re motivated by our mission, and passionate about the work you’d be doing.
• You’re not scared of hard problems. On the contrary, you welcome the challenge of becoming immersed in a complicated domain, where the problems you’ll be solving really matter.
• You are a do-er. You have a humble attitude, a proactive approach, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
• You are flexible. While your primary role is as a researcher, the nature of working at a dynamic startup is that you could be working on many adjacent tasks from one day to the next, from marketing to design to strategy to product management.
  
  
  

Benefits

• Direct impact on the product and go-to-market direction of Optiml from the earliest days
• Attractive stock options package as reward for being an early joiner.
• We work primarily from our Zürich office, but offer the possibility of some remote work and flexible hours.
• Shit happens: 100% accident non-occupational accident insurance (UVG) covered.
• Flexible parental leave.
• Learning and development budget of CHF 1k (conferences, certificates, etc.).