What the work looks like

Most of your time goes to structured review of scientific content: model-generated proposals, real-world R&D data, and technical materials inside your own function — discovery biology, med chem, protein/antibody engineering, computational, in vivo/translational, PK-PD, tox, or CMC. You label and annotate outputs against criteria the client defines, then flag where the model's reasoning is chemically or biologically unsound rather than merely wrong on the answer. A second stream is judgment work: written or live commentary on target and modality selection, optimization trade-offs, developability risk, and what would actually kill a program before IND. Tasks arrive in batches; you also help shape the schema and quality bar for the dataset pipeline itself, which means arguing for what a defensible label even is.

What the screen is actually filtering for

The hard gate is the employer type. The client wants people who developed drug assets in-house at a company that has put programs into the clinic — not CRO or CDMO service delivery, not academic-only, not QC/analytical, not clinical development, diagnostics, or regulatory writing. Expect follow-ups that test whether you owned scientific decisions or executed someone else's protocol: which compounds you advanced and why, what you deprioritized, what the DMPK or tox data said that changed the plan. Modality specificity matters — 'small molecules' is thin next to a concrete account of an ADC linker-payload trade-off or an ASO chemistry decision. Depth beats breadth; five-plus years is the stated bar, flexible where the depth is unusual.

Logistics

  • Fully remote, hourly, asynchronous for the bulk of annotation work
  • Live sessions — expert interviews, research engagements — scheduled against the client team's working hours
  • Volume varies by project phase; treat it as part-time alongside a current role unless told otherwise
  • Seniority welcome from individual contributor through Director; ICs still doing bench-adjacent work are explicitly in scope
  • Pay observed in the $85–142/hr range and set by depth and function, not guaranteed