What the work involves

You are assigned to one of four narrowly defined research areas and, depending on where your publication record sits, you will create problems, solve them, review completed work, or audit it. The assignment is agreed with you after matching. Every deliverable carries written reasoning: a problem is not finished until another specialist in your subfield could follow the argument and verify it independently without asking you a question. In practice that means fully justified steps, explicit parameter ranges and branch choices for analytic continuations, stated conventions for Lax pairs or curvature tensors, and symbolic or numerical checks you can point to.

This is research-grade output, not throughput work. A single problem plus its solution and write-up can absorb many hours. The benchmark paper is [arXiv:2509.26574](https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26574) — reading it first is the fastest way to know whether the work interests you.

What the platform screens for

  • The phenomenon, not the neighbourhood. The most common decline is an excellent physicist who commands the methods but has not published on the specific phenomenon. Weingarten calculus in a random-matrix paper is not the same as replica permutation models for random tensor network entanglement; Calogero-Moser work is not automatically half-wave maps.
  • Verifiable authorship. Three to five representative papers with arXiv IDs or DOIs, ideally within five years, first author strongly preferred. Each is checked against the public record, and every area you select must be backed by a paper of your own or it is not scored.
  • Symbolic computation fluency. LaTeX, Python, SymPy and Jupyter are working tools here more than in most panels; familiarity with an agentic coding extension in VS Code is a plus. Declared gaps are acceptable, overstated ones are not.
  • Written English at B2 or above, because the argument is the product.

Logistics

Remote, asynchronous, no fixed hours. Roughly 10 hours per week sustained across an 8–10 week window, starting immediately. Observed pay runs $80–110/hr, set by how closely your subdomain matches the area — depth of match, not seniority, moves the number. After paper verification you are either onboarded directly or invited to a short live alignment call; a 30–45 minute assessment is added only where the panel needs it, and most applicants will not see one.