What the work actually is

You author self-contained life science scenarios that put a model in a working biochemist's position: a construct that won't express, a Western with an unexpected band, a kinetics dataset that doesn't fit the assumed mechanism, a knockdown phenotype that contradicts the pathway model. Each scenario ships with a reference answer that spells out the mechanistic reasoning — not just the conclusion, but why the alternatives fail. The second half of the job is grading: you read model responses and judge whether the biochemistry is right, whether the experimental logic would survive a lab meeting, and whether a fluent-sounding explanation is quietly inventing a regulatory step, mis-assigning a cofactor, or confusing correlation in an omics readout for mechanism.

That last category — confidently wrong but well-written — is the thing labs are paying for. Generic scientific literacy catches obvious errors. Catching a plausible but fabricated allosteric mechanism, or an assay design that has no proper control, takes someone who has run the bench work.

What the screen looks for

  • Verifiable hands-on depth. Which techniques you personally ran, on what systems, and what failed. Cloning, protein expression and purification, sequencing workflows, enzymology, or assay development — named specifically.
  • Reasoning you can write down. Reference answers are read by people who weren't in your lab. Vague mechanistic hand-waving doesn't grade.
  • Calibrated judgment. Whether you can distinguish a wrong answer from an unconventional-but-defensible one, and say where a scenario is genuinely ambiguous.
  • Realistic availability. 10 hours per week is a floor, not a stretch goal.

Logistics

Fully remote and asynchronous — no standing meetings, no fixed shift. You pick up batches, deliver against a turnaround window, and scale hours up or down week to week. Payment is weekly via Stripe at a rate set from your experience within the observed $60–120/hr band; the top of that band tends to go to PhDs with publication records or industry research background, and rates are set by the platform rather than guaranteed by this listing. Work is routed to your declared specialty, so a structural biologist is not asked to grade metabolomics.