What the work involves

Projects vary, but the core of the job is converting your own chemical judgment into something a model can be graded against. That means authoring problems with a real substrate, real conditions, and real analytical data, then writing the reference answer and the reasoning that justifies it. On grading tasks you assess model output: is the disconnection sensible, is the selectivity claim actually supported by the conditions, do the reported spectra match the structure assigned. A large fraction of the value is in the third bucket — catching routes that are textbook-correct and bench-impossible because of side reactivity, functional group tolerance, workup losses, or a reagent that simply does not behave that way at scale.

Most of the deliverable is prose. You are explaining why a call is right, not just marking it, and reviewers read your reasoning as closely as your verdict. Chemists who can write a tight paragraph on why an SNAr is disfavored at that position tend to get invited back more than those who leave a one-line score.

What the platform screens for

  • Hands-on recency. Whether you personally ran the reactions or the calculations and interpreted the raw data, recently enough to defend specific decisions. Where you trained matters far less.
  • Depth under follow-up. The AI interview probes: expect it to push on a claim you make and ask for the mechanism, the evidence, or the alternative you ruled out.
  • Calibration and honesty about limits. Saying "outside my subfield, here's who I'd check with" scores better than a confident bluff.
  • Comfort with ambiguity. Instructions are sometimes underspecified; flagging that is treated as a signal, not a complaint.

Logistics

Fully remote and asynchronous, with project-level deadlines rather than fixed shifts. Hours are typically part-time and elastic — some projects want a handful of hours a week, others a concentrated burst. Past rates have run $65–$105/hr, observed and set per project by scope and depth — not guaranteed, and the actual rate is named on the specific project listing you get invited to.

Important: this is a standing pool listing, not a job opening. It does not accept or reject anyone. You apply, take a roughly 20-minute AI interview, get verified, and sit in the chemistry pool until a matching project runs. That wait can be a week or several months depending on client demand.