micro1 is contracting physics PhDs and postdocs to write rigorous, fully documented solutions to advanced problems in their own subfield, used as training and evaluation data for frontier AI models. Work is remote and asynchronous at roughly 10 hours/week across an 8–10 week engagement, with observed rates of $80–140/hr.

Summary, eligibility guidance and screening preparation are prepared by Sidequest from the platform's posting. Check the source listing before applying.

The work

You receive advanced physics problems drawn from your specialization and produce complete, publication-quality solutions: derivations stated step by step, assumptions and approximations named explicitly, limiting cases checked, and final results presented in LaTeX. Where symbolic or numerical verification helps, you show it — SymPy, Python, and Jupyter notebooks are the expected tooling. A meaningful part of the job is critique rather than computation: spotting when a problem statement is under-specified, when boundary conditions are inconsistent, or when a stated result fails dimensional analysis, then proposing a defensible interpretation instead of guessing.

Submissions go through reviewer feedback, and you're expected to integrate corrections cleanly rather than defend a first draft. The standard is the one you already apply to your own manuscripts: reproducible, unambiguous, and readable by another physicist who wasn't in your head.

What the screen looks for

micro1 runs an AI-led interview before any project assignment. It is not testing AI familiarity — no prior AI work is required. It tests whether your claimed expertise survives follow-up questioning:

Verifiable research identity: named subfield, thesis or postdoc topic, and 2–5 recent papers with arXiv IDs or DOIs
Depth under probing: expect the interviewer to push past your summary into methods, approximations, and why a particular technique was appropriate
Evaluation judgment: how you handle an ambiguous or subtly wrong problem statement, and how you decide when a model's reasoning is wrong versus merely unconventional
Written precision: whether you can specify assumptions without hand-waving
Honest tooling self-assessment, including where you'd want support

Logistics

Fully remote contractor engagement, asynchronous, no fixed hours. Plan on approximately 10 hours per week sustained over 8–10 weeks; consistency matters more than volume, since reviewer iteration cycles depend on your turnaround. Pay in the $80–140/hr range has been observed for this listing and typically varies with subfield scarcity, credential stage, and project tier — treat it as reported, not guaranteed. Renewal or additional project tracks are common but not promised.

Physics Expert (PhD / Postdoc)

The work

What the screen looks for

Logistics

Interview prep — 10 questions