What the work involves

You build problems, not just answers. A typical task starts from a realistic unit-operations or plant scenario — a distillation train, a batch reactor scale-up, a relief system sizing, a heat integration decision — and runs through mass and energy balances into equipment selection and safety review. You then write the reference answer, including the reasoning chain: why this column pressure, why this relief scenario governs, why this material of construction, what assumption would change the result. The reasoning is the deliverable as much as the number is.

The second half of the work is grading. You read model output and judge it for technical accuracy and process safety, and the hard cases are the ones that read fluently and cite the right correlations but would fail at scale — a design that ignores fouling, a HAZOP that never considers loss of cooling, a relief calc that picks the wrong governing case, a solvent choice that is thermodynamically fine and operationally dangerous. Flagging plausible-but-unsafe output with a written explanation of the failure mode is the core skill the platform is buying.

What the screening looks for

  • Verifiable engineering history: what plants, what processes, what you personally owned versus reviewed
  • Depth under follow-up in at least one of process design, process safety, or scale-up — expect the screener to push past the first answer
  • Ability to explain why a design decision is wrong, at the level of governing case, assumption, or failure mode, rather than asserting it
  • Written English clear enough that a lab reviewer with no chemical engineering background can follow the logic

Logistics

Fully remote and fully async — no standing calls, no shift coverage. You set your hours each week with a floor of roughly 10. Pay is observed at $100–130/hr, disbursed weekly via Stripe; rates and volume vary by project and are not guaranteed. Work is ongoing rather than a fixed engagement, with task batches released as labs commission new domains. Simulation access (Aspen Plus, HYSYS) is helpful context but the tasks are authored and graded in writing, not in a simulator.