What the work involves

You'll spend most of your time doing three things: writing reference decks the way you would have for an MD, evaluating model-generated slides against banking convention, and writing the critique that explains why a slide fails. A typical task might be a prompt like "build a five-page executive summary for a sell-side process in industrial distribution" — you produce the gold-standard version, then score two model attempts against it on storyline logic, action-title quality, exhibit choice, and whether the deck would survive a first-round MD markup. Rationale matters as much as the ranking; a score with no written justification is worth little to the lab.

Expect heavy attention to the things bankers internalise and rarely articulate: horizontal logic across action titles, vertical logic within a page, MECE framing, when a waterfall beats a stacked bar, why a football field belongs on page 12 and not page 3, and the difference between a fact title and an insight title. You'll also flag content that is formally clean but professionally wrong — a deck that looks polished and cites a comp set no banker would defend.

What the platform screens for

Ethos runs an AI voice screen before any live conversation. It probes for verifiable specifics — firm, group, years, deal types you staffed on — and then follows up on craft: how you'd storyline a particular situation, what you'd cut from a page, how you'd handle a model output that's plausible but subtly off. Generic answers about "attention to detail" collapse under the second follow-up. Candidates who can talk concretely about page counts, title conventions, and specific exhibit choices tend to pass.

Logistics

  • Fully remote, fully asynchronous; no fixed hours or standups
  • 5–20 hours per week, more available for people who want it
  • Rate observed at $100/hour; not guaranteed and may vary by task type and tenure
  • Work is tasked in batches with turnaround windows rather than live deadlines
  • PowerPoint fluency is assumed — you will be producing and marking up actual slides