Machine Learning Research Expert

What you'll do

AfterQuery builds expert evaluation data for frontier AI labs. In this role you write realistic machine learning research problems drawn from your own work (experiment design, ablations, evaluation and failure analysis), then solve each one to a reference answer with the reasoning behind every step. The ad also asks you to catch the research mistakes that look reasonable but that only a practitioner would spot.

The ad is explicit about who it does not want: ML engineers focused on deployment, data engineers and data annotators. It is looking for people whose experience is in research.

Who fits

• A Master's or PhD in computer science, statistics, mathematics or a related field
• 3+ years of full-time ML research after your degree; a postdoc counts, PhD years do not
• Hands-on experience designing experiments, running ablations or evaluating models
• Strong Python and a deep learning framework such as PyTorch or JAX
• Able to commit at least 10 hours per week
• Preferred: publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL or CVPR; time at an industry lab or university research group; clear written English and comfort explaining a result step by step

What it pays

The board shows $115/hr and the ad text gives no range, so that is the figure recorded here. The ad lists weekly pay via Stripe. It does not say how the rate is set or whether it varies by project.

Worth knowing

Good:

• The work stays in your specialty and is judged on research judgment, not volume
• Fully remote and async, with no fixed hours; you can scale up or down week to week
• Weekly pay via Stripe

Less good:

• The experience bar is high: three years of research after your degree, with PhD years excluded
• At least 10 hours a week is required
• The ad does not describe the hiring steps; AfterQuery's help centre describes an unpaid, one-attempt assessment and identity verification (see the company page)

About this listing

Read from the AfterQuery Experts board on 18 October 2026, posted 7 October 2026. The qualifications, the 10 hour minimum and weekly Stripe pay are the ad's own text. See AfterQuery.