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What the work is
Role Overview
We are seeking an experienced Chemistry expert to lead a pod of trainers building realistic, terminal-based scientific tasks for Terminal Bench Science. You will review every task your trainers produce for chemical correctness, reproducibility, safety, and grader reliability, and coach trainers to consistently deliver high-quality, challenging tasks.
What you'll do
- Review trainer tasks end to end, including task statements, molecular structures, spectra and datasets, force-field parameters, environments, reference solutions, and automated tests.
- Verify that tasks reflect authentic chemistry research workflows and require genuine multi-step reasoning rather than a single library call or lookup.
- Check that software versions, force fields, basis sets, functionals, and dependencies are pinned and that results are reproducible.
- Validate chemical correctness, including units such as Hartree, eV, kcal/mol, and kJ/mol; charge and spin multiplicity; stereochemistry and tautomer handling; method specifications; SCF and geometry convergence; frequency checks for minima and transition states; equilibration; and sampling adequacy.
- Ensure tolerances reflect method-dependent, numerical, and stochastic variation without accepting chemically incorrect results.
- Ensure graders verify energies, geometries, thermodynamic quantities, rate constants, spectral assignments, or molecular properties rather than formatting.
- Ensure tasks cannot be gamed through hard-coded outputs, reading test files, or bypassing the intended computation.
- Screen tasks for chemical safety and dual-use concerns.
- Escalate content involving the synthesis or enhancement of hazardous, toxic, or controlled substances.
- Provide clear, actionable written feedback and track revisions through closure.
- Onboard and mentor trainers on task design standards, common pitfalls, and grader design.
- Allocate work across the pod and track throughput and quality metrics.
- Escalate blockers.
- Maintain pod documentation covering guidelines, recurring issues, and exemplary tasks.
Who gets hired
- Ph.D., postdoctoral experience, or equivalent advanced experience in chemistry or a closely related field.
- Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++, Julia, or Fortran, with Linux and terminal proficiency.
- Hands-on experience with computational chemistry, molecular simulation, cheminformatics, or chemical data analysis.
- Proven experience reviewing code, analyses, manuscripts, or research outputs.
- Experience mentoring or leading small technical or research teams.
- Excellent written communication skills for providing precise, constructive feedback
Nice to have
- Familiarity with PySCF, Psi4, ORCA, xTB, CP2K, NWChem, GROMACS, OpenMM, AmberTools, RDKit, Open Babel, ASE, or MDAnalysis.
- Experience with free-energy methods, reaction mechanism analysis, machine-learned potentials, or spectroscopy simulation.
- Familiarity with Docker, Git, CI systems, automated testing, and HPC environments.
- Experience designing benchmarks, programming tasks, or simulation-based evaluations.
Offer Details
- Commitments Required: At least 4 hours per day and minimum 40 hours per week with overlap of 4 hours with PST.
- Employment type : Contractor assignment (no medical/paid leave)
- Duration of contract : 4 week [expected start date is next week]
The platform posted this on 22 Oct 2026.