What the work involves

The unit of work is a judgment call written down clearly. On authoring tasks, you take a design problem from your own working life — a bracket, a shaft, a heat sink, a weldment, a pressure boundary — and restate it with the loads, boundary conditions, material callouts, and tolerances a model would need, then write the reference solution the model's attempt is graded against. On grading tasks, you read a model's written analysis and decide whether the free body diagram closes, whether the failure mode it chose is actually governing, whether the safety factor is applied to yield or ultimate or the right stress at all, and whether the numbers survive a unit check. A third strand is the one engineers find most familiar: the design satisfies the calculation and still fails in the shop — no tool access on that fastener, a press fit that opens up at operating temperature, a wear surface with no hardness spec.

What the platform screens for

The AI interview runs about twenty minutes and is looking for whether you have actually owned a design through build and consequence, not whether you can recite mechanics of materials. Expect follow-ups that push on one project until you name the specific load case, the specific standard, and what changed after first article or field return. Written clarity carries real weight here, because the deliverable is almost always prose explaining why an answer is wrong and what the correct reasoning path was. Willingness to say "this task is underspecified, here is what's missing" is treated as a signal, not a complaint.

Logistics

  • Fully remote and largely asynchronous; project listings name their own hours, typically part-time alongside other work.
  • Observed past rates have run $70–$125/hr, set per project by scope and depth — not guaranteed, and not fixed by this listing.
  • This listing issues no accept or reject. You join the mechanical engineering pool after background verification and are invited to specific project listings when one matches; the wait has ranged from a week to several months.
  • Hiring, rate, and client are all decided on the downstream project listing, not here.