What the work involves

You'll spend most of your time producing and grading artifacts rather than writing prose commentary. A typical task gives you a client scenario — scattered 401(k)s and a Roth, a variable-income household, $38k of mixed-rate debt — and asks you either to build the deliverable yourself as a reference answer, or to review the model's attempt at it and explain precisely where it goes wrong. That means Excel workbooks with working formulas (drawdown sequencing, amortization schedules, sensitivity tables), client-facing slide decks that survive a real review meeting, and written plan documents where the tone and disclosure language matter as much as the math.

The failures you're catching are usually not arithmetic. Models tend to produce a plan that is internally consistent but professionally wrong: an avalanche payoff schedule that ignores the client's stated need for early wins, a drawdown model that never touches tax location, a net-worth statement that treats an illiquid business interest like a brokerage balance, or a risk questionnaire whose scoring bands don't map to any defensible allocation. Your job is to name that gap in terms a non-advisor reviewer can act on.

What the screen looks for

Ethos runs an AI voice screen before human review. It probes for four things: that your 4+ years were genuinely spent advising individual households rather than institutional or purely sales roles; that you can reason out loud through a planning scenario with specific numbers and assumptions; that you can articulate why an output is deficient rather than just rewriting it; and that your spreadsheet and deck craft is real — expect questions about how you'd structure a model, not just whether you've used Excel.

Logistics

  • Fully remote, fully asynchronous — no client calls, no fixed hours
  • 5–20 hours per week, with more available to contributors who want it
  • $70/hour observed for this band; rates vary by project and are not guaranteed
  • Work is claimed from a queue, so consistency week to week matters more than volume in any single week