What the work involves

You are producing and judging the deliverables a research practice actually ships. A typical batch might ask you to write a discussion guide and screener for a hypothetical discovery study, then evaluate two model-generated versions of a thematic coding summary against a raw transcript set and explain which one preserved participant meaning and which one invented a theme. Other tasks run through spreadsheets — survey cross-tabs, sample size and margin-of-error notes, research repository tagging schemas — and slide decks where the argument, evidence hierarchy, and recommendation have to hold up to a product director's scrutiny. Much of the value you add is in the written rationale: why a finding is over-claimed from n=5, why a journey map stage is mislabeled, why a verbatim was pulled out of context.

What the platform screens for

The screen, including an AI voice interview, is looking for researchers who have owned studies end to end rather than executed one slice of them. Expect probing on method specifics: how you code inductively versus deductively, when you would not run a survey, what you do with a leading question you wrote and only noticed in the third session. Ethos also cares about craft in the artifact itself — whether you can build a findings deck that leads with the decision at stake, and whether your spreadsheets hold up under someone else's inspection. Evaluation judgment matters as much as research judgment: graders who can articulate a consistent standard and apply it to borderline outputs are worth more than graders who only flag obvious errors.

Logistics

  • Fully remote, asynchronous; no standing meetings and no fixed hours
  • 5–20 hours per week, with more available if you want it
  • Rate observed at $70/hour — reported by contributors, not a guaranteed figure
  • Work arrives in batches with written guidelines that are revised over time; reading rubric updates carefully is part of the job
  • Expect an onboarding calibration period where your early submissions are reviewed closely before volume increases