Developmental Psychology (PhD)

What you'll do

You evaluate, review and annotate data sets about children's learning and behaviour, and give detailed feedback on whether data and model output are accurate, culturally appropriate and developmentally plausible. Beyond review, you contribute expert analysis to scenario development and test cases built on real-world situations involving children.

The most durable part of the work is guideline writing: creating or refining the rules an AI system follows on the linguistic, cognitive and psychosocial aspects of child development, across diverse backgrounds. The result is a standards document that outlives any single batch of data. The ad also lists collaboration with interdisciplinary teams, so expect some engagement with people outside your field.

Speak one of these languages? Say so

This line sits at the very bottom of the ad. Applicants with proficiency in one or more of these are being prioritised: Japanese, French, Tagalog, Malay, Lithuanian, Russian, Georgian, Polish, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Vietnamese, Swahili, Mandarin, Cantonese, Indonesian, Turkish, Gujarati, or Bulgarian.

None is required (the PhD is what gates the role), but if you hold one, make sure the screening questions capture it. The brief explicitly covers child development "across diverse backgrounds", so a second language would be put to real use here.

What you need

• A doctorate in child development, developmental psychology, or a closely related field
• Comfort working remotely on digital platforms, delivering independently while engaging with a distributed team

That is the whole list, and no prior AI experience is needed.

Clinical experience is explicitly optional. The role is described as especially suited to people with a research or academic background in child development, "with or without direct clinical experience". If you are an academic, a postdoc, or someone who left research for something else, this listing is written for you.

Nice to have

• Demonstrated involvement in technology-driven, digital or AI-focused projects related to child development, called "highly desirable" but not required

What it pays

$100–200/hour. The band is $100 wide with no published basis for placement within it.

The ad carries no compensation-structure section at all, so whether the hourly figure buys your time or is a per-task equivalent is unanswered on the page. Ask before you accept.

Worth knowing

Good:

• 101 openings, an unusually large intake for a credentialed role, which gives far better odds than three- and five-seat listings
• No clinical licence, no caseload, no AI experience: the PhD and the subject knowledge are the whole requirement
• Written for academics and researchers, a group that usually has nowhere to sell this expertise by the hour
• Guideline authoring is substantive work with a longer half-life than annotation
• Nineteen named languages carry explicit priority

Less good:

• No compensation structure stated anywhere on the listing
• A $100-wide band with no published basis for where in it you land
• The doctorate is a hard gate; master's-level developmental specialists and experienced educators are not admitted
• No screening process and no start timeline described
• Contractor engagement: no benefits, no notice period, your own tax to manage
• 101 openings on a single project also suggests a large, fast data-collection push rather than a long engagement, and no project duration is stated
• Neither the customer nor the product the guidelines will govern is named, which is worth weighing when the subject is children

About this listing

Posted by micro1 on its own jobs portal, confirmed open on 7 September 2026. The $100–200/hour band, the 101 openings, the scope of work and the language priority list are its own published text for this listing.

The nineteen languages are prioritised rather than required, so the language field is left empty rather than asserting a requirement the ad did not make. No country restriction is named on the ad itself, so eligibility is left open. We could not verify the pay structure or the per-task rate; neither is stated. Screening and payment run at the platform level. See micro1.