Propulsion & Effects Engineer

Role Overview

Help evaluate how advanced AI systems respond to technical questions involving energetic materials, propulsion, initiation systems, and terminal effects. You will create realistic edge-case scenarios that distinguish legitimate professional inquiries from requests that could enable misuse, helping ensure models provide useful technical support while applying appropriate safety boundaries.

Key Responsibilities

• Create challenging single-turn domain prompts categorized as benign, dual-use, or adversarial.
• Assess model responses against a defined policy standard and determine whether each response was handled appropriately.
• Write reference responses and explain the technical reasoning behind the correct outcome.
• Apply practitioner judgment to questions involving propulsion performance, qualification, safety standoffs, safe-and-arm logic, and related effects analysis, recognizing when otherwise routine technical content may indicate harmful intent.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing, qualifying, or testing propulsion and initiation systems, supported by real hardware and test-data experience.
• Ability to distinguish routine professional questions from requests intended to obtain harmful capabilities.
• Relevant experience may include munitions or warhead design and effects engineering; solid, liquid, or hybrid propulsion design, test, and qualification; terminal-effects modeling involving blast, fragmentation, or penetration; fuzing, safe-and-arm, and initiation-system engineering; or test-range engineering and instrumentation for propulsion or ordnance.
• Red-teaming experience is preferred.
• Strong technical writing ability. Published research, prior technical writing, or expert witness experience is valued; include a writing sample or link with your application.

Work Terms

• Remote, per-task independent contractor engagement.
• The work is writing-intensive and involves sustained reading and writing about misuse scenarios in this field. You will receive advance briefing and may pause or step away at any time without penalty.

Compensation

• 65 to 75 per task.

Eligibility

• Work must not involve or rely on classified information, export-controlled information, material covered by an NDA, or material subject to prepublication review obligations.
• Candidates with these obligations may still be eligible if they disclose them in the application so the work can be appropriately scoped.