Job Search Master List
A gentle intervention
Soon to be unemployed?
Absolutely Fucked?
I hope this might help a smidge
… open research roles, already filtered
Status: unemployed
- Open roles
- …
- Employers
- …
- Universities
- …
- Metros
- …
No roles match that filter.
Not covered above
Check these by hand
These employers run custom career portals with no machine-readable feed, so they cannot be pulled automatically. Several of them are the best-fit employers on the whole list, so this section is not optional.
Start here
How to work this
- Do not browse. Set alerts. Every Tier 1 and most Tier 2 sources support saved searches or email alerts. Browsing burns hours and finds less.
- Budget about 90 minutes a week. Roughly 45 minutes on Tier 1, 30 on whatever Tier 2 is due, 15 on outreach.
- Track applications in a sheet with date, employer, title, lane, link, status, follow-up date. Fifteen open applications with no tracker becomes chaos fast.
- Apply within 72 hours where you can. At the research shops especially, reqs are often filled first-good-candidate rather than best-of-full-pool.
Tier 1
Check weekly
The highest ratio of roles you could actually get to listings you have to read.
1.The applied research shops, direct
The single highest-density source. These organizations do the work you do now, hire into titles you qualify for, treat a master's as the credential gate rather than a stretch, and several are strongly remote-friendly. Most sit in the DC corridor, so relocating stays optional.
| Organization | Base | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Westat | Rockville MD | westat-jobs.westat.com · closest single match to your current job |
| Mathematica | DC + Princeton | careers.mathematica.org · strong remote posture |
| Abt Global | Rockville MD | abtglobal.com/careers · many US roles fully remote |
| AIR | Arlington VA | Greenhouse board · explicitly a behavioral science org |
| RTI International | RTP + DC | Greenhouse board |
| NORC | Chicago + DC | norc.jobs.net |
| Urban Institute | DC | Workday board |
| ICF | Fairfax VA | Workday board · behavioral & social science federal work |
| MDRC | NYC + Oakland | mdrc.org careers |
| RAND | Arlington + Santa Monica | Workday board · skews senior, check anyway |
2.The Ultimate UX Research Job Board
Maintained by User Interviews, remote-focused, last refreshed July 2026.
The best single curated list for the ResearchOps and UXR lane, and it is free.
Check it before any generic job site.
userinterviews.com/blog/the-ultimate-remote-ux-research-job-board
3.LinkedIn, saved-search alerts only
Set four or five saved searches from the strings below, alerts on daily. This is where industry and staff roles surface first, and your Meta and UMD connections mean referral paths show up here that show up nowhere else. Do not browse the feed.
Tier 2
Check every two weeks
Lower volume, but the relevance per listing is high and the applicant pools are small.
5.AAPOR Career Center, plus DC-AAPOR
The professional association for survey and public opinion research, roughly 2,000 members across
academia, government, nonprofits and industry. Low volume, very high relevance.
The DC chapter runs its own local board, unusually well targeted for someone in
Northern Virginia and almost unknown outside the field.
National career center ·
DC-AAPOR job postings
6.HFES Job Board
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. In here specifically because
Human Factors is one of your top endorsed skills, carried over from Meta. This is
where human factors roles concentrate and the applicant pools stay small.
jobs.hfes.org
7.Market research and consumer insights
Your Smith School work is consumer behavior, which is a direct credential here.
GreenBook Insights Careers ·
Quirk's ·
Insights Association ·
Insights Career Network
8.Higher ed, if staying in academia is acceptable
Only worth it for a better institution, better pay, or a title bump. Same work, known quantity.
HERC is free and syndicates directly from member institutions' HR systems.
HERC ·
HigherEdJobs
9.Federal and federal-adjacent
Census Bureau, BLS and NCES are among the largest survey research employers in the
country and a natural fit for a behavioral or survey background. Separately, the
Office of Evaluation Sciences at GSA is the federal applied behavioral science
team in DC, which is your current job pointed at policy instead of a business school. Small team,
posts rarely, worth a standing alert.
USAJOBS ·
oes.gsa.gov
10.Behavioral science shops, direct
Small teams, so they post infrequently and never syndicate. Check the careers pages directly.
Behavioural Insights Team ·
ideas42 ·
Irrational Labs ·
Center for Advanced Hindsight / Common Cents Lab (Duke)
Tier 3
Monthly, or situational
Real but thin. Worth a pass once a month rather than a weekly habit.
11.Research tooling companies
Companies that sell research infrastructure hire research coordinators and ResearchOps people by
those exact titles, and most are remote-first. Prolific is worth a specific look,
it runs academic participant panels, which is your exact world commercialized.
User Interviews ·
Prolific ·
Dscout ·
UserTesting ·
Qualtrics ·
Sago
12.Nonprofit and mission research
Idealist is the main board. Also PATH, FHI 360 and Population Council if global health interests you.
13.The clinical regulatory return path
Only if you want it. Your year at TRI doing eTMF and document review is a real credential that does
not expire quickly, and this lane pays well. Target employers: Emmes (Rockville),
Technical Resources International (Bethesda, warm re-entry), and the NIH support contractors.
ACRP ·
CenterWatch ·
PharmiWeb.jobs ·
BioSpace
14.Tech-specific aggregators
Only if Lane A becomes the primary focus. Built In · Wellfound · UI/UX Jobs Board
15.Decision science community channels
No formal board, but jobs circulate through the SJDM quarterly newsletter, the jdm-society mailing
list (open to read and post), and Decision Science News. Low volume, but
these are the roles nobody else sees.
SJDM newsletters ·
Decision Science News jobs
16.ResearchOps Community
Slack-based community founded in 2018, practitioners in 100+ countries. Not really a job board, more where ReOps roles get mentioned before they are posted. Worth joining for the network rather than the listings.
17.UMD internal and alumni channels
You are current staff and a UMBC alum. Internal transfer boards, Smith School career services and Handshake alumni access are all cheap to check and occasionally surface things that never go public.
Nothing matches those filters.
Save your time
Worth deliberately skipping
Knowing what not to do protects the 90 minutes.
ORISE / Zintellect federal fellowships
Stipend appointments with no benefits progression, aimed at people with no work history. At five years plus a master's, this is a step down.
FlexJobs
Paid subscription, and most of what it lists is aggregated from sources on this page that are free.
Browsing Indeed or Glassdoor
Saved-search alerts only. For these titles the signal-to-noise is bad enough that manual browsing is a poor use of the time.
Academic postdoc boards
Wrong track. This is staff-research experience, not faculty-track.
Copy these
Search strings
Use across every board. Keep the lanes in separate searches, do not mix them into one.
Lane A · ResearchOps and UXR
Your differentiated angle, and the one most people with this background never think to search.
Lane B · Applied and survey research
Highest volume, and the best geographic fit given the DC concentration.
Lane C · Clinical regulatory ops
Only if you want this path. The TRI credential is real and does not expire quickly.
Positioning
Three résumés, not one
The lanes want different framing. A single generic résumé underperforms in all three. Same facts throughout, different order and emphasis.
Lane A · ResearchOps and UXR
Lead with Meta. Reframe the UMD role as research operations: participant pipeline, RA team management, scheduling, tooling, data quality.
Lane B · Applied and survey research
Lead with UMD Smith as experimental behavioral research: design, execution, coding and analysis, plus conference presentation. Master's front and center.
Lane C · Clinical regulatory ops
Lead with TRI: eTMF, document review, regulatory compliance.
Highest leverage
Network, which outperforms all of the above
- Smith School faculty whose studies you run. They place students into industry and consulting constantly, and they are the warmest referral source available.
- Meta. A contractor who returns is a much easier hire than a stranger.
- DC-AAPOR runs local events. For someone in Northern Virginia aiming at survey research, showing up in person is disproportionately effective relative to the effort.