User Researcher

### About the Company Adalat AI is building an end-to-end justice tech stack that automates manual and clerical pain points in courtrooms, giving judges back time to focus on what matters most: decision-making and delivering justice. Our solutions, from AI-powered transcription in Indian languages to case-flow management and document navigation, are now deployed across 9 states, covering nearly 20% of India's judiciary. Backed by leading technology companies and funders, and incubated at MIT and Oxford, Adalat AI is working to eliminate judicial delays and expand access to timely justice. Founded by a team with backgrounds in law, technology, and economics from Harvard, Oxford, MIT, and IIIT Hyderabad, we are scaling rapidly across India and the Global South. We're also the first nonprofit YC has backed in nearly five years, and the first Indian-founded nonprofits in its history. ### Role Overview As our **first User Researcher**, you will be the voice of one of India's most complex and underserved user bases: judges, court staff, and legal professionals navigating a system built on decades of legacy process. Understanding them, and earning their trust, requires patience, curiosity, and a genuine interest in how institutions work at the ground level. Adalat AI has lawyer-led state teams on the ground in our partner states to support user research. They know the courts, the people, and the terrain. They will support your access and logistics so you can focus on research, not navigation. You'll sit within the design team and have direct influence over product direction. Your research will shape what gets built, what gets dropped, and what gets prioritised next. ### Key Responsibilities #### Field Research and User Engagement * Travel pan-India (about 50% of your time) to conduct contextual observation, interviews, and usability sessions with judges, clerks, and stenographers * Work alongside Adalat AI's lawyer state leads in partner states who will facilitate access, provide legal and cultural context, and help you build rapport with judicial stakeholders faster * Surface pain points, workarounds, and latent needs that don't show up in feedback forms, support tickets or mixpanel data #### Research Design and Execution * Plan and run end-to-end studies: screeners, discussion guides, facilitation, synthesis * Choose the right method for the constraint. Contextual inquiry and shadowing in-field v/s remote interviews from base * Build and own Adalat AI's research ops practice * Build our quantitative research pipeline from the ground up, establishing how we survey users, instrument the product and close loop on adoption and task success alongside our existing qualitative sources * Triangulate qualitative and quantitative evidence so recommendations carry both depth and scale #### Insight to Impact * Translate research into clear, actionable briefs that directly inform feature prioritisation, product direction, and design decisions * Partner with designers to ensure UX decisions are grounded in real courtroom context * Collaborate with the legal partnerships and operations team to embed research touchpoints within deployment cycles #### Cross-functional Influence * Represent the user in design reviews and product planning as a decision-making voice, not just a reporting function * Help product and engineering internalise nuanced user contexts: varying digital literacy, multilingual usage, and the weight of institutional process * Champion a culture of continuous discovery across the team ### Qualifications * 5 to 7 years of experience in user research * Proven ability to independently design and run qualitative research studies * Strong primary field research instincts, comfortable in unfamiliar environments with non-tech-savvy users * Ability to synthesise ambiguous, messy data into clear product recommendations * Willingness and genuine enthusiasm to travel up to 50% across India * Experience building a research practice in an early-stage or 0-to-1 environment ##### **Nice to have:** * Exposure to legal, government, or civic-tech contexts * Proficiency in additional Indian languages, a real advantage given the diversity of our user base * Familiarity with research tools like Mixpanel, Maze, or equivalent ### What You Will Achieve in a Year * Build Adalat AI's user research practice from zero: methods, templates, and a living insight repository * Establish sustained access and trust with judicial users across multiple states * Deliver research that directly shapes the roadmap for our flagship products * Help design tools that are actually used, and trusted, inside India's courtrooms ### **Join Our Team** If you're driven by meaningful work and want to build technology that changes how justice is delivered — we'd love to hear from you. Apply now and be part of a team that ships fast, thinks deeply, and works on problems that matter. 👉 [**Apply here**](https://www.adalat.ai/careers/user-researcher) Visa sponsorship is offered for this role.