Principal Engineer / Professor — Technical Expert

Role Title: Principal Engineer / Professor — Technical Expert

Role Type: Contractor

Location: Remote

Opportunity Snapshot

Pay: **$80- $185/hour **

Commitment: Flexible — fits alongside your current role

Location: Fully remote

**You’ll need: **Master’s or PhD in an engineering or physical science field, plus principal-level industry experience or a faculty appointment

Your tasks: Build challenging technical problems from your own domain and define what makes an answer correct

micro1 is engaging principal-level engineers, scientists, and faculty to design the technical problems that measure what AI systems can actually do. Your domain expertise is what matters here — no prior AI experience required.

We’re building this across four areas: aerospace, semiconductors, manufacturing and industrial engineering, and materials science. If your work sits in one of those — or across two of them — this is for you.

The work draws on what you already know: the problems where the textbook answer isn’t enough, where the right approach depends on reading the constraints correctly, where a plausible-looking solution is quietly wrong.

What you’ll do

• Design difficult technical problems from your own area, with realistic constraints and supporting data.

• Provide the correct solution and walk through the reasoning that gets there.

• Define objective criteria for correctness, so another expert reviewing the work would reach the same verdict.

• Review problems built by other contributors for technical accuracy and soundness of method.

• Flag problems that turn out to be ambiguous or ungradable rather than submitting them. What we’re looking for

• Master’s or PhD in engineering, physics, materials, or a closely related field.

• Principal, staff, or fellow-level experience at a major engineering organization, a national lab, or a faculty appointment at a leading university.

• Deep technical depth in at least one area, with hands-on ownership of the work.

• Able to explain why an answer is correct clearly enough that another expert could verify it.

• Publications, patents, or a record of technical leadership is a strong plus. How the selection process works

• Apply and complete the screening questions

• Complete the AI interview for this role

• Profile review

• Onboarding — our Talent Ops team will get you set up