Remote Pod Lead - Chemistry

Turing, a rapidly growing AI company, is at the forefront of 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. Leveraging these advancements, Turing builds real-world AI solutions that address critical business challenges across industries.

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

Key Responsibilities:
- Review trainer-created tasks thoroughly, including task descriptions, molecular structures, spectra, datasets, force-field parameters, environments, reference solutions, and automated tests.
- Ensure tasks represent authentic chemistry research workflows requiring genuine multi-step reasoning rather than simple library calls or lookups.
- Confirm that software versions, force fields, basis sets, functionals, and dependencies are properly pinned 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.
- Set appropriate tolerances that reflect method-dependent, numerical, and stochastic variations without accepting chemically incorrect results.
- Verify that graders assess energies, geometries, thermodynamic quantities, rate constants, spectral assignments, or molecular properties rather than superficial formatting.
- Prevent tasks from being gamed through hard-coded outputs, reading test files, or bypassing intended computations.
- Screen all content for chemical safety and dual-use concerns, escalating any involving hazardous, toxic, or controlled substances.
- Provide clear, actionable written feedback and track revisions through to completion.
- Onboard and mentor trainers on task design standards, common pitfalls, and grader design principles.
- Manage workload allocation within the pod and monitor throughput and quality metrics.
- Escalate any blockers promptly.
- Maintain comprehensive pod documentation including guidelines, recurring issues, and examples of 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.
- Practical experience in computational chemistry, molecular simulation, cheminformatics, or chemical data analysis.
- Demonstrated experience reviewing code, analyses, manuscripts, or research outputs.
- Proven ability to mentor or lead small technical or research teams.
- Excellent written communication skills for delivering precise, 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 daily and a minimum of 40 hours per week, with a required 4-hour overlap with Pacific Standard Time (PST).
- Contractor assignment with no medical or paid leave benefits.
- Contract duration is 4 weeks, with an expected start date as early as next week.

This role offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge AI-driven scientific task development while leading a specialized team in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.