Applied Research Scientist [Machine Visibility]

The Opportunity

You'll be Prerender's first dedicated researcher, working directly with the CEO — not just reporting, but actively brainstorming, exploring questions, and shaping the research agenda together.

The starting point: billions of rendered pages and crawl data spanning dozens of bot types. This data exists but hasn't been organized for systematic research. You'll build the data infrastructure that makes rigorous research possible, then use it to produce work no one else can.

There's no existing research team, no inherited methodology, no playbook. You'll build it all.

Some of the questions waiting to be studied:

• How do GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI crawlers actually behave in production — and how do agentic sessions differ from passive crawlers?
• What patterns predict whether a page will be visible to an LLM versus a traditional search crawler?
• How is the ecosystem of web-crawling bots evolving, and what does that mean for how the web gets built?
• What does 'machine-readable' actually mean when the machines are large language models?

What You'll Do

Build the Research Infrastructure

Organize, clean, and structure Prerender's existing data for systematic analysis. Design and build new data collection streams to answer questions the current data can't. Create the foundation that makes a sustained cadence of original research possible.

Conduct and Publish Original Research

Design and execute studies using Prerender's data, web-scale datasets, and primary research methods. Own the full research lifecycle: question framing, methodology, analysis, and findings. Produce work ranging from quick data snapshots to in-depth flagship studies — all published under your name.

You'll build deep domain expertise along the way: profiling crawler behavior at scale by bot type, maintaining a living behavioral taxonomy of known and emerging bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and whatever ships next), and tracking the frontier — bot documentation changes, LLMs.txt adoption, schema evolution, and published research.

AI is both a subject and a tool in this role. You'll research how LLMs crawl, how AI search systems behave, and how autonomous agents interact with web content, while using AI tools to accelerate your own analysis, synthesis, and pattern recognition.

Inform Business Decisions

Bring data to the conversations that shape what Prerender builds, how we sell, and where we invest. Work across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and leadership to replace assumptions with evidence.

Who You Are

• Rigorous and deeply curious — you care about getting it right and keep pulling the thread when the first answer comes too easily.
• Technically self-sufficient — you've built your own data pipelines, wrangled messy datasets, and written the code to get from raw data to analysis.
• Independent — you set your own agenda and drive projects from conception to publication without needing constant direction.