Trainee Scientist jobs

DataAnnotation is looking for an experienced Drug Discovery Chemist - AI Trainer to design chemistry problems that today's leading AI models still get wrong. Models routinely propose impossible mechanisms and syntheses that no bench chemist would attempt. You bring the subject knowledge to catch these errors, and the tooling to prove them.

This is a new and growing area for our company, focused on teaching AI to reason correctly rather than plausibly. The work combines deep chemical knowledge with strong coding skills: you design, test, and validate complex tasks yourself. Your task and your solution become the ground truth a model is scored against, so accuracy is the entire job.

Advantages of contracting with us:

• You will be able to choose which projects you want to work on and when.
• You work on your own schedule, on your own computer, from the comfort of your own home.
• Projects are paid hourly up to $40-$125 USD per hour, with bonuses on high-quality work.

Responsibilities:

• Design complex chemistry tasks in your area of expertise.
• Define what a correct answer looks like and the standard a model has to meet.
• Test and validate the task yourself before you submit it.
• Write a step-by-step solution another researcher could reproduce.
• Design tasks a model cannot solve by replaying a known answer, and flag where its chemical reasoning breaks: impossible mechanisms, unsafe conditions, unphysical results, misread spectra.
• Work across computational and physical chemistry, cheminformatics, molecular modeling, and analytical workflows.

Qualifications:

• Fluency in English (native or bilingual level).
• An active research background in chemistry or chemical engineering: advanced graduate student, postdoc, academic researcher, or industry practitioner.
• Strong coding skills. You write Python and work comfortably at a terminal as part of your research, not as a side interest.
• Familiarity with reproducible or containerized environments such as Docker is a plus.

Note: Payment is made via PayPal. We will never ask for any money from you. PayPal will handle any currency conversions from USD. Only applicants in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States will be considered for this role. This is an independent contractor position.