Behavioral Scientist

The Predictive Index•Westwood, MA

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Predictive Index (PI) is seeking a Behavioral Scientist to provide the scientific foundation and integrity for a new PI venture. This role is crucial for exploring, validating, and building a new market, ensuring all claims, instruments, and insights are scientifically sound and defensible. The position requires a deep understanding of industrial-organizational psychology, assessment science, team dynamics, leadership, engagement, and job fit, translating rigorous research into actionable product features and messaging. The Behavioral Scientist will work on a lean, fast-moving team operating like a venture-backed startup, with direct reporting to the venture lead and collaboration across product, engineering, and go-to-market functions.

Requirements

A PhD (or equivalent applied experience) in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Organizational Behavior, Psychometrics, or a closely related field.
Deep hands-on experience in psychometric development: scale construction, IRT or CTT, validation design, and norm development.
Demonstrated ability to conduct applied validation research in real organizational settings — not only academic labs.
Fluency translating rigorous science into language that product teams can build from and buyers can trust.
Comfort working at the frontier, where the research agenda, the product roadmap, and the go-to-market strategy are all still being written.
Passion for using AI in every aspect of your work — we're an AI-forward team that expects every member to take full advantage of modern tools to sharpen thinking, move faster, and extend the team’s capacity.
A builder’s mindset. This team moves fast, operates lean, and expects every person to cover surface area beyond their title.

Responsibilities

Provide the scientific foundation and defensibility of the venture’s claims.
Apply industrial-organizational psychology — assessment science, team dynamics, leadership, engagement, and job fit — to product, positioning, and research decisions.
Design and validate any new psychometric instruments, scales, or scoring models the product requires, holding them to the same scientific bar as PI’s existing assessments.
Run applied research with pilot customers — criterion and construct validation, efficacy studies, norm development — to prove the product produces the workplace outcomes it promises.
Translate peer-reviewed I/O and organizational behavior research into product features, UX, and go-to-market messaging that HR leaders and business leaders will trust.
Own the scientific defensibility of the venture’s claims — technical manuals, validity evidence, white papers — so the new product inherits the credibility bar PI is known for.