User Researcher (Boston)

User Researcher

Boston, MA — On site

About Lumia

Lumia is building the next evolution in wearable health technology: Smart Earrings that translate complex physiological signals into clear, actionable insights.

We sit at the intersection of hardware, software, machine learning, and physiology. We started by serving deeply underserved communities including people with POTS, ME/CFS, Long COVID, and orthostatic intolerance, and are now expanding into a broader consumer wellness platform without losing the technical depth and scientific rigor that make us different.

Our founding team includes repeat entrepreneurs and ex-Bose engineers. We move fast, care deeply about quality, and believe the best products come from people with taste, ownership, and strong first-person product conviction.

The opportunity

We are hiring our first User Researcher to own and scale how Lumia listens to its users.

You will translate real-world user behavior, feedback, and data into clear, actionable insights that de-risk product decisions across both hardware and software. Research at Lumia is not a passive function that produces reports. It is a high-leverage, fast-moving operation that directly unblocks product decisions.

You will work directly with the CEO, Product, Design, Engineering, and Algorithms teams. You should be excited by messy product spaces, behavioral data, and the satisfaction of proving something actually works before it ships at scale.

What success looks like

• High-impact hardware usability failures surfaced, quantified, and resolved before mass production
• Qualitative and quantitative insights translate directly into tangible product changes
• Target customers proven to complete onboarding through full activation before launch
• Post-launch adoption and drop-off understood and continuously fed back into product improvements
• Research systems built that deliver high-quality insight fast enough to keep pace with rapid product iteration

What you will do

• Design and run fit, comfort, durability, and handling studies in real-world conditions alongside Mechanical Engineering
• Run user testing on onboarding flows, new features, and core app experiences to validate users can complete key journeys without support
• Conduct user interviews and design surveys to discover and validate insights that drive product direction
• Analyze product usage data alongside qualitative research to build a complete picture and distinguish signal from noise
• Build and maintain a panel of users available for rapid research
• Create repeatable research processes and disseminate findings in a way the whole team can act on

What we are looking for

• 3+ years of user research experience, ideally in consumer hardware or mobile products
• Strong command of both qualitative methods (interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry) and quantitative methods (surveys, usage data analysis)
• Experience with wearables, health tech, or physical consumer products is a strong plus
• Comfortable working at startup speed where research needs to inform decisions in days, not weeks
• A track record of research that directly changed what got built

How you think and work

You live the product, cut through noise to find what matters, and produce conclusions the team can actually act on. You move at startup speed without sacrificing the rigor that makes research trustworthy.