Physical Sciences Expert - Terminal Bench

Overview

ExpertWoka is seeking a Physical Sciences Expert to develop realistic, terminal-based scientific tasks for a benchmark environment. This contract role is focused on translating authentic physics, chemistry, materials science, astronomy, and computational science workflows into reproducible tasks with objective grading criteria.

What You'll Do

• Design multi-step terminal tasks based on realistic physical-science workflows.
• Develop self-contained computational environments with pinned dependencies and scientific software.
• Create input datasets, molecular structures, simulation parameters, experimental data, or model configurations.
• Implement expert solutions using scientific programming tools.
• Develop automated tests for numerical accuracy, physical consistency, convergence, and output structure.
• Create tasks involving simulations, numerical modeling, data fitting, optimization, spectroscopy, molecular analysis, or scientific visualization.
• Define numerical tolerances, units, boundary conditions, and expected scientific behavior.
• Validate reproducibility and ensure tasks execute successfully without runtime downloads.
• Debug issues involving dependencies, precision, solver stability, performance, and file formats.

Requirements

• Ph.D., postdoctoral experience, or equivalent advanced technical experience in a relevant physical-science discipline.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C/C++, Julia, Bash, or another scientific programming language.
• Experience working in Linux or terminal-based environments.
• Experience with numerical methods, scientific modeling, simulations, or quantitative data analysis.
• Ability to create and validate computational scientific workflows independently.
• Strong understanding of units, numerical precision, physical constraints, and scientific reproducibility.
• Full-time availability: 40 hours per week.
• 4 hours of PST overlap per day.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with NumPy, SciPy, pandas, matplotlib, SymPy, JAX, or similar libraries.
• Familiarity with molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, finite-difference methods, Monte Carlo methods, optimization, or statistical modeling.
• Experience with tools such as OpenMM, ASE, RDKit, Psi4, LAMMPS, GROMACS, or other domain-specific software.
• Familiarity with Docker, Conda, Git, CI systems, and automated testing.
• Experience working with HPC systems or performance-sensitive scientific workloads.
• Experience evaluating AI coding or terminal agents.
• Research software engineering experience.
• Experience creating benchmark tasks or automated graders.
• Publications or open-source contributions involving computational science.
• Experience converting experimental or research workflows into reproducible packages.

Project Details

• Contractor assignment.
• Estimated engagement length: 5 weeks.
• Start date: Immediate.
• Payment is per approved task.
• Average task handling time: 6-8 hours.

Evaluation Process

• Interest Check Form (ICF).
• Assessment.
• Delivery manager review.
• Applicants must complete a screening test before taking one subject-specific test.