Applied Research Scientist [Machine Visibility]

Remote

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Responsibilities

Build the research function at Prerender — on a dataset no one else has.
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.
Build a reputation, not just a resume: Develop deep expertise in a growing field and a body of published work that compounds. Details

Prerender is a dynamic rendering SaaS that makes websites visible to machines — search crawlers, AI bots, and autonomous agents.
The starting point: billions of rendered pages and crawl data spanning dozens of bot types.
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?
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.
Hands-on large-scale data analysis — you've queried production data independently, not just read dashboards. Proficient in SQL and Python.
Comfort with AI tools — you're already using them in your research workflows. Nice to Have Direct