Remote Pod Lead - Chemistry

Turing is a rapidly growing AI company focused on advancing and deploying powerful AI systems. The company collaborates with leading AI labs to push the boundaries of model capabilities in areas such as reasoning, coding, multimodality, and STEM knowledge. These advancements are then applied to develop real-world AI solutions that address critical business challenges.

We are looking for an experienced Chemistry expert to lead a team of trainers in creating realistic, terminal-based scientific tasks for Terminal Bench Science. In this role, you will be responsible for reviewing all tasks produced by your team to ensure chemical accuracy, reproducibility, safety, and grading reliability. You will also coach trainers to maintain high standards and develop challenging, authentic tasks.

Key Responsibilities:
- Conduct thorough reviews of trainer-created tasks, including task descriptions, molecular structures, spectra, datasets, force-field parameters, environments, reference solutions, and automated tests.
- Ensure tasks replicate genuine chemistry research workflows and require multi-step reasoning rather than simple library calls or lookups.
- Verify that software versions, force fields, basis sets, functionals, and dependencies are fixed to guarantee reproducibility.
- Validate chemical correctness by checking units (Hartree, eV, kcal/mol, kJ/mol), charge and spin multiplicity, stereochemistry, tautomer handling, method specifications, SCF and geometry convergence, frequency checks, equilibration, and sampling adequacy.
- Confirm that tolerances account for method-dependent, numerical, and stochastic variations without accepting incorrect chemical results.
- Ensure graders assess energies, geometries, thermodynamic quantities, rate constants, spectral assignments, or molecular properties rather than formatting details.
- Prevent tasks from being gamed through hard-coded outputs, reading test files, or bypassing intended computations.
- Screen all tasks for chemical safety and dual-use concerns, escalating any content involving hazardous, toxic, or controlled substances.
- Provide clear, actionable written feedback and track revisions until issues are resolved.
- Onboard and mentor trainers on task design standards, common pitfalls, and grader design principles.
- Allocate work within the team and monitor throughput and quality metrics.
- Escalate any blockers promptly.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation covering guidelines, recurring issues, and exemplary tasks.

Required Qualifications:
- Ph.D., postdoctoral experience, or equivalent advanced expertise in chemistry or a closely related field.
- Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++, Julia, or Fortran, with proficiency in Linux and terminal environments.
- Hands-on experience in computational chemistry, molecular simulation, cheminformatics, or chemical data analysis.
- Proven ability to review code, analyses, manuscripts, or research outputs critically.
- Experience mentoring or leading small technical or research teams.
- Excellent written communication skills for delivering precise and constructive feedback.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits:
- Familiarity with computational chemistry software such as 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.
- Knowledge of Docker, Git, continuous integration systems, automated testing, and high-performance computing environments.
- Experience designing benchmarks, programming tasks, or simulation-based evaluations.

Offer Details:
- Commitment of at least 4 hours per day and a minimum of 40 hours per week, with a required 4-hour overlap with Pacific Standard Time (PST).
- Employment type is a contractor assignment without medical or paid leave benefits.
- Contract duration is 4 weeks, with an expected start date as early as next week.