The opportunity

Nanogram is a mobile app: a scrollable feed of playable games that anyone can make from a single text prompt. Users scroll an endless feed, play instantly, and create their own. We are building a new category between social video and gaming. The product is live on the App Store, the company is backed, and the London team is being built now.

The role

You will build Nanogram's habit lab from scratch. You take what behavioural science and neuroscience already know about why people come back to things (reward and anticipation, variable rewards, habit formation, social validation, loss aversion) and map it onto our product: which drives it already triggers, which it misses, and which loops we could build around them. Then you test those ideas on real users.

The question that is yours to answer: what makes people feel compelled to come back to Nanogram every day and send it to their friends, and how do we design loops that create that feeling?

The number you own: D30 retention and sessions per day.

What you'll do

Research: Turn research on reward, habit and social behaviour into clear hypotheses for Nanogram ("if we do X, people will feel Y and come back")
Testing: Run studies, playtests, interviews and live experiments, and watch how people actually react, not only read dashboards
Loops: Hand the loops that work to the product team to build, and learn from the ones that don't
Team: Work daily with the founders, the Product Lead, engineers, designers, and our growth and AI leads. As the lab proves itself, you hire and lead a small team

What we're looking for

[Must have] You have been the mind behind an engagement loop or habit in a live consumer app or game that clearly moved retention or how often people open the app. You can name the loop, the psychology behind it, and the number it moved.
[Must have] You have personally dug into why users behave the way they do (user studies, interviews, playtests, behavioural data) and turned what you found into experiments that actually ran.
PhD or equivalent depth in neuroscience, psychology, cognitive or behavioural science, and you apply that research to products rather than only quoting it.
You think in experiments a small team can run in days or weeks, and you explain the science in plain words to founders and engineers.
Several years in-house at a games studio, social app or daily-use consumer app.

Nice to have: experience on a social or creator platform; lab or biometric methods (eye tracking, skin response, EEG); experience hiring or leading a small research team; talks or publications on game or app psychology.

You do not need to be an engineer. Our team builds.

Why Nanogram

Early-stage, with funding and a live product. Not a slide deck company.
Your research shows up in the product, not just in reports.
Small team, real ownership, and a chance to build a function from the start.
Around £150k salary.

Logistics

Location: London, or remote from the US East Coast or anywhere in the EU.
Contract: Full time
Start: ASAP

Process

CV screen and TechTree screening
Founder call (30 minutes): your story, your experience, salary and notice period
Deep dive (60 minutes): your last two roles in detail, including the loops you designed, how you dug in, what changed, and what didn't work
Final with all the founders: you present a take-home. You use Nanogram for a few days, note when and why you open it, look at our data, and come back with the human drives Nanogram triggers today and which it misses, the study you would run to find out why users do or don't come back, and three loop ideas to test.

Feedback within 48 hours of every stage. A one-month notice period is fine.