About the Company
Incubated by Frist Cressey Ventures and backed by CVS Health Ventures, 25M Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Samsung Next and others, Thrive Mobile is the world's only wireless platform built for healthcare. Many Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries struggle with unreliable wireless service, frequent number changes, and limited data, all of which disrupt access to care. We partner with health plans and state governments to distribute a mobile service that includes an embedded engagement layer on the device itself. This allows members to stay connected, stay covered, and access important benefits and healthcare services without friction. Our mission is simple: build the mobile platform that makes healthcare easier.
About Thrive
Incubated by Frist Cressey Ventures and backed by CVS Health Ventures, 25M Health, Memorial Hermann Health System, Samsung Next and others, Thrive Mobile is the world's only wireless platform built for healthcare. Many Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries struggle with unreliable wireless service, frequent number changes, and limited data, all of which disrupt access to care.
We partner with health plans and state governments to distribute a mobile service that includes an embedded engagement layer on the device itself. This allows members to stay connected, stay covered, and access important benefits and healthcare services without friction.
About the Role
We are looking for a User Researcher to make sure every product, content, and design decision at Thrive starts from a real understanding of the people we serve.
Our members are Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and dual-eligible beneficiaries. They are rarely the people a product team thinks of first, and they are almost never in a usability panel. Their phone number may have changed three times this year. They may share a device with family, run out of data mid-month, read English as a second language, or have learned to distrust anything that sounds like it came from an insurance company. Building for them well requires someone whose job is to go find out what is actually true, and bring it back in a form the team can act on.
You don't need a healthcare background to succeed here. If you have built your craft helping teams create human-centered digital experiences and you want to apply it where it can change outcomes for people the system usually overlooks, we want to hear from you. We would rather teach you HEDIS than teach you how to run a good interview.
In year one, you build the member insight engine. You will set up how Thrive recruits, talks to, and learns from members — phone-first, multilingual where needed, respectful of people's time and circumstances — and you will run the studies that shape our most important bets: onboarding and first-30-days, the in-device engagement layer and Thrive Assistant, benefit activation, and the content journeys that drive gap closure and coverage continuity.
Longer term, you are the keeper of member truth. A living body of insight — segments, journeys, mental models, and a research repository — that anyone at Thrive can pull from, so we stop re-learning the same lessons and start compounding them.
This role sits in the Product team, reporting to the Head of Product, and works day to day with our Product Designer and our Member Engagement Manager. You will own the research process end to end: framing the right questions with the team, designing studies, writing discussion guides and surveys, recruiting and interviewing members, and synthesizing what you learn into clear recommendations that shape our product strategy, our content, and our designs.
We are AI-native and expect you to be. You will use LLMs daily for discussion guides, transcript synthesis, tagging, and prototyping stimuli — while knowing exactly where the model's judgment stops and yours has to start.
Location: New York, NY — hybrid in-office Tuesday–Thursday (West Village coworking space)
Compensation: $115,000–$140,000 base + performance bonus + meaningful equity + health, dental, and vision benefits
What You'll Do
Run research end to end
- Plan and run the right study for the question: in-depth interviews, usability and concept testing, diary studies, surveys, call listening, and field visits where it matters.
- Write sharp research plans that start from the decision the team needs to make, not the method you want to use.
- Balance generative work (what do members need, fear, and do today?) with fast evaluative work (does this flow, screen, or message work?).
Recruit and research with our members, respectfully
- Build repeatable recruitment pipelines into Medicaid and Medicare populations — through our own device and SMS channel, Client Ops, care teams, and community partners.
- Adapt your methods to the population: phone-based sessions, flexible scheduling, plain-language consent, appropriate incentives, interpreters or bilingual sessions, and accommodations for older adults and people with disabilities.
- Hold a high bar on research ethics, informed consent, and HIPAA-compliant handling of member information.
Partner with Design to shape the product
- Work shoulder to shoulder with our Product Designer to test prototypes early and often, and turn findings into specific design changes rather than a report on a shelf.
- Help define the mental models, segments, and journeys our designs are built around.
Partner with Member Engagement to shape the content
- Work with our Member Engagement Manager to test messaging for clarity, reading level, tone, trust, and cultural framing before it goes to thousands of members.
- Dig into the why behind journey performance — when a gap-closure or redetermination pathway underperforms, go find out what members are actually experiencing.
- Catch the framing insight that a completion rate will never show you.
Inform product strategy
- Partner with the Head of Product to frame research around our biggest strategic questions and bring back insight that changes the roadmap when it should.
- Combine qualitative findings with behavioral data from Amplitude, Snowflake, and Sigma to give the team a fuller picture than either source alone.
Make insight compound
- Build and maintain a lightweight research repository and insight library so learnings accumulate across studies, states, and clients.
- Share findings in formats people actually use: short readouts, clips from member calls, journey maps, and one-page summaries.
About You
We are hiring for research craft and member empathy first, and healthcare knowledge second.
- 2–5 years of UX research experience on digital products. You have helped teams craft human-centered digital experiences and can walk us through how your research shaped specific design or product decisions.
- Experience with people who aren't typical tech users, or a genuine drive to get it. Older adults, low-income or underbanked consumers, immigrant communities, people with limited digital literacy — you know (or are eager to learn) how to recruit, adapt your methods, and earn trust with people who are hard to reach.
- Hunger to learn the domain. You want to understand Medicaid, Medicare, and the healthcare quality landscape. We will teach that.
- Strong research craft. You choose methods deliberately, write unbiased guides, run a great conversation, and know the difference between what people say and what they do.
- Synthesis that leads to action. You turn messy qualitative data into a clear story and specific recommendations. Send us a readout you are proud of.
- Empathy without assumption. You go in curious, not with a persona already written, and you are comfortable being proven wrong by members.
- Clear, plain-language communication. You can explain a finding to a designer, an engineer, a clinician, and an executive, and adjust for each.
- Comfortable doing your own analysis. You can analyze survey results, pull and interpret behavioral data in tools like Amplitude, Sigma, or Snowflake, and combine it with qualitative findings to tell the full story. SQL is a plus, not a requirement.
- AI-native. You use LLMs daily for research operations and synthesis, and you can articulate where they help and where you would never rely on them — interpreting a member's lived experience among them.
- A genuine partner. You enjoy working alongside design, content, and product rather than handing off a deck and moving on.
Nice to have
- Research experience in healthcare, public benefits, or civic tech, including working with PHI, consent, and compliance review.
- Spanish-language fluency, or experience running multilingual research.
- Familiarity with Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, dual-eligible populations, or healthcare quality programs (HEDIS, Stars, redetermination).
- Experience researching SMS-first, mobile, or low-bandwidth experiences.
- Health literacy, plain language, or accessibility training, formal or self-taught.
- Experience with research ops tooling (Dovetail, Condens, or similar) or building a repository from scratch.
More about Thrive
Thrive Mobile was founded in June 2022 with the audacious goal of helping millions of low-income Americans improve their wellbeing through technology.
To deliver on this goal, Thrive has built the world's first healthcare-focused mobile company. We provide our members with a full-stack mobile solution including the network (i.e., talk, text, and data) and the hardware (i.e., smartphones) that, when combined with the influence we have over the device's operating system and app layer, allows for our members to better engage with their healthcare. Thrive Mobile uses a B2B2C go-to-market model to drive customer growth, acquiring customers through our clients' membership base across Medicare Advantage, Managed Medicaid, Marketplace or Commercial.
Thrive's business model aggregates revenue from multiple sources to enable a higher ARPU (average revenue per user) than typical mobile providers serving low-income customers, and a strategic partnership with T-Mobile provides a differentiated cost structure. Additionally, our healthcare alignment enables lower churn, a key driver of financial performance. Sources of revenue include:
- Clients: Health insurance plans (e.g., Aetna) or state governments (e.g., Louisiana Department of Health) who are responsible for the healthcare cost of Thrive members.
- Government programs: As an FCC licensed wireless carrier we have the capability to collect dollars from available government programs that our members have access to. Today, we focus on the Lifeline Program, a federal program administered by the FCC which provides $9.25 / month per customer. Automatic eligibility qualifications include Medicaid and SNAP, enabling over 70 million Americans to qualify for Lifeline.
- Member/Customer: Thrive aspires to deliver the "best deal in wireless" and be able to provide service at no cost to the customer, however some situations will warrant the customer to pay a monthly fee (usually <$20 / month).
- Partners: We connect our members with trusted partners who can provide services that improve their wellbeing, and then help these partners (e.g., Amazon Access, Instacart) engage our members over time.
Our Investors (select sample)
- Frist Cressey Ventures
- CVS Health Ventures
- 25M Health
- Memorial Hermann Health System
- Samsung NEXT
Total Raised to Date: $21M ($7M pre-seed, $9M unnamed round, $5M priced seed)
Our Advisors (select sample)
- Will Shrank (ex-CMO @ Humana, a16z Partner)
- Jesse Hunter (ex-CSO @ Centene)
- Ravi Mehta (ex-CPO, Tinder)
- Jon Wilkins (ex-FCC Chair)
Compensation & Benefits
$115,000–$140,000 base + performance bonus + meaningful equity
- Standardized salaries based on position, no matter where you live
- Incentive Stock Options aligned to salary, role and impact
- Hybrid work options in New York, NY
- Thrive Mobile Mission Days: 4x per year we individually take a full day away from the office to connect with the Thrive mission
- $2,000 annual learning & development budget
- Unlimited vacation and sick days
- $1,000 yearly vacation bonus for taking five consecutive days of vacation, fully unplugged from work
- Up to six weeks of paid bereavement leave, medical leave, and disaster leave
- 12-week paid parental leave after 6 months at the company
- 5-week sabbatical on your 5 year anniversary
- Health insurance, dental and vision, commuter benefits, & 401(k) benefits with company matching
- Guaranteed minimum 1-month severance if things don't work out