Lead Research Analyst - Data, Cloud & AI

About Qualitate

Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis - replacing weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output.

Expert research is a broken industry dominated by legacy incumbents with expensive, manual, and slow services. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling expert calls, and synthesizing insights across fragmented providers. The process takes weeks to produce short-lived intelligence.

Qualitate transforms this workflow by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI. Qualitate’s AI Moderator interviews thousands of experts simultaneously each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. The platform turns these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language. Our customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms.

The Role

You'll own Data, Cloud & AI coverage at Qualitate from day one. You’ll be stepping into 10,000+ discussions conducted over more than 2 years covering all the core names in the space - the largest structured library of buyer discussions in the world. As a domain expert, you'll take this unprecedented dataset to the next level and bring even more authority to it.

This is a rare research opportunity: a proprietary dataset no one else has, in one of the most closely watched spaces in markets today. You'll shape the research roadmap and products, and produce compelling, data-driven insights for the investors and corporate teams who rely on us. Reporting directly to the Director of Research, you'll be the voice of this coverage in front of our biggest clients.

What the day-to-day looks like:

• Leverage the company’s proprietary datasets to uncover insightful company and market trends across AI and machine learning operations, databases, data integration and access, and data governance for investment funds and corporate clients.
• Develop forward-looking analyses and uncover industry dynamics, key growth drivers, and demand shifts across themes including the durability of enterprise AI budgets, competitive displacement between model and platform vendors, data consolidation, and the movement of analytics and inference workloads across cloud environments.
• Contribute thought leadership by creating high-impact content for our newsletter and client communications.
• Clearly and effectively communicate actionable insights to clients and prospects through calls, webinars, and events.
• Contribute domain expertise and research judgement to hone the fidelity of our first-to-market research methodology; partner with product and engineering teams on design to continue the creation of our best-in-class AI-native research platform.
• Stay ahead of emerging trends, technologies, and innovators shaping the future of data infrastructure and AI - agents reaching production, inference economics, lakehouse and vector architectures, open-source models challenging the leading foundation models, and more.

Who This Role Is For

• 3+ years professional experience in data-driven research creation. Equity research, financial analysis, market research, and/or consulting roles.
• You understand the fundamental research workflow. How funds source ideas, build conviction through primary research, size positions, and manage risk. You can articulate how Qualitate fits into that process in the terms buyers actually care about. You know which metrics matter to software and AI investment decisions - net retention, seat versus consumption dynamics, and where reported growth diverges from underlying usage.
• In-depth knowledge of key Data & AI sectors including AI & Machine Learning Operations, Databases and Data Management, Data Integration & Access, Data Governance, BI & Advanced Analytics, and the adjacent cloud services and infrastructure layer.
• You communicate your ideas clearly. Long-form and short-form writing expertise required - you must be able to synthesize data into digestible, forward-looking insights. You should feel comfortable talking to investors and corporate clients as an authority on data infrastructure and AI.
• You experiment heavily with AI. You’re constantly testing and refining AI tools and agents as they ship, and build them into your daily workflows - automating pieces of your own job to drive higher productivity - and sharing learnings with your team.

What Sets You Apart

• A strong sense of ownership. You’ll be tasked with turning our existing data collection across data management and AI into a market-defining research product, and continuously iterating on coverage to stay ahead of what’s most topical. You’ll have full ownership over our coverage strategy and research direction in one of our fastest-moving categories, with full autonomy to identify emerging areas of focus that define the ever-changing landscape.
• An analytical mind. You get excited about diving into a large semi-structured dataset to understand key inflections and generate new ideas. Proficiency in managing/analyzing large data sets. SQL experience is strongly preferred.
• The ability to understand both signal and cycle. Most vendors in this space claim that they are well positioned to capitalize on AI-driven growth - you are able to distinguish between budget that is genuinely new, budget that has been relabeled, and the likelihood of new opportunities coming to fruition. Importantly, you can prove which is which with practitioner evidence.
• You use AI for both speed and rigor. You understand that AI can be used to both accelerate your initial learning in a space and help you go deeper than you otherwise could have - pressure-testing ideas, automating the analyses you never had time for, and expanding what one analyst can rigorously cover.
• You learn and iterate quickly. You’ll be working alongside accomplished professionals across research, product, and engineering. Pick up what they know and implement; impart what’s incremental onto them.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $140k-$200k
• Bonus: Variable dependent on achievement of goals at the company level, team level, and individual level
• Equity: Meaningful early-stage grant with upside tied to company growth
• Benefits: Health coverage, flexible PTO, paid holidays
• Location: Full-time, in-person in New York City

What to expect working at Qualitate

• Excellence. You’ll be held accountable to an exceptionally high bar and impact.
• High velocity. Fast paced work environment in terms of growth, decision making, and time to impact.
• High agency. Ownership over how you work, not just what you work on. We hire people we trust to figure it out.
• A builder’s mindset. You'll create the processes, playbooks, and systems that define how this company scales.
• Shared ambition. A small, early team disrupting the multi-billion dollar market research industry with AI.
• Joy. We work hard and genuinely enjoy working with each other. Dedication to our work is matched only by our passion for fostering an enjoyable, collaborative work environment.

Qualitate is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage candidates of all backgrounds to apply.