Astronomer QA Lead - Remote

About the role

In this hourly, remote contractor role, you will work as an Astronomer Quality Assurance Lead to oversee quality, consistency, and trainer performance across astronomy and astrophysics AI training projects.

Responsibilities

• Spot-check astronomy/astrophysics items, identify quality issues, provide ongoing feedback through DMs, and escalate recurring or critical issues.
• Evaluate AI-generated astronomy/astrophysics explanations, calculations, diagrams, observational interpretations, comparisons, and step-by-step reasoning for accuracy and clarity.
• Update trainers and QAs on Discord about new item guidelines, project changes, workflow updates, quality expectations, and astronomy/astrophysics-specific review standards.
• Respond to trainer/QA questions clearly and promptly, especially around physical assumptions, units, astronomical terminology, observational methods, formulas, and rubric interpretation.
• DM contributors who are inactive or not working, encourage activation, track follow-ups, and flag availability issues when needed.
• Create and maintain astronomy/astrophysics project documentation, including style guides, trackers, FAQs, quality notes, examples, honeypots, calibration tasks, and onboarding materials.
• Schedule and run onboarding/training calls with trainers and QAs to explain project expectations, workflows, rubrics, quality standards, and astronomy/astrophysics-specific review requirements.
• Ensure all trainers and QAs apply astronomy/astrophysics review guidelines consistently and understand updates as projects evolve.
• Flag misleading, overconfident, physically impossible, numerically incorrect, or poorly sourced astronomy/astrophysics claims.
• Identify recurring quality gaps, propose workflow improvements, and help build scalable QA processes for astronomy/astrophysics AI training projects.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD degree in Astronomy, Astrophysics, Physics, Space Science, Planetary Science, Cosmology, or a closely related field.
• Strong grasp of the English language to follow project guidelines, communicate with teams, and provide clear written feedback.
• 3+ years of experience in astronomy/astrophysics research, teaching, science communication, academic review, data analysis, observatory work, or related scientific workflows.
• Strong understanding of celestial mechanics, stellar evolution, galaxies, cosmology, electromagnetic radiation, observational methods, spectroscopy, planetary systems, black holes, and scientific uncertainty.
• Ability to evaluate astronomy/astrophysics content against detailed rubrics and identify issues such as incorrect physical assumptions, wrong units, flawed calculations, hallucinated facts, misleading explanations, or oversimplified conclusions.
• Familiarity with tools or methods such as Python, astronomical datasets, telescope/observatory data, spectroscopy, photometry, simulations, LaTeX, Jupyter notebooks, or scientific visualization is preferred.
• Experience leading or supporting remote teams of researchers, educators, reviewers, annotators, science writers, or QAs is strongly preferred.
• Comfortable working in fast-moving remote environments using tools such as Discord, Google Sheets, Google Docs, trackers, dashboards, and project management systems.
• Highly detail-oriented and organized, with the ability to maintain style guides, FAQs, trackers, onboarding materials, calibration tasks, and documentation.
• Experience with AI training, data annotation, LLM evaluation, scientific QA, academic review, or rubric-based review is a strong plus.