Web Researcher (AI Benchmarking)

About Us
Gramian Consultancy is a boutique consultancy specializing in IT professional services and engineering talent solutions. With a strong background in software engineering and leadership, we help companies build high-performing teams by matching them with professionals who truly fit their needs.
Role overview
Our client is building advanced evaluation benchmarks for frontier AI browsing agents.
We are looking for highly skilled investigative researchers who can design research problems that remain difficult even for state-of-the-art AI systems with full web access. This is not a traditional subject-matter or content-writing role. The work is centered on open-web investigation, evidence tracing, source validation, and benchmark construction.
You will begin from a verifiable fact, work backwards to construct a difficult research question, and document a complete, auditable evidence trail showing how the answer can be independently verified.
CONTRACT: Short-term freelance/contractor assignment, 8 weeka
COMMITMENT: 40 hours per week, at least 4 hours per day, including 4 hours overlap with PST
LOCATIONS: Remote, GLOBAL
Responsibilities
Design challenging open-web research problems for evaluating advanced AI browsing agents.
Start from objectively verifiable facts and construct questions that make those facts difficult to discover.
Build multi-step clue structures involving dates, people, places, organizations, works, events, records, and quantities.
Ensure every clue is independently verifiable and subject to clear constraints.
Research across government databases, institutional sources, archives, registries, and PDF documents.
Produce complete evidence trails citing exact pages, tables, sections, or records.
Record validation searches and document what obvious search approaches return.
Test whether research questions remain difficult across multiple search attempts.
Refine questions to eliminate ambiguity while preserving difficulty.
Deliver structured, reproducible research documentation.
Requirements
Background in reference librarianship, archives, or special collections.
Experience in investigative journalism or professional fact-checking.
Experience with OSINT, due diligence, KYC, or investigative research.
Background in patent, prior-art, or legal-discovery research.
Experience with genealogy or historical records research.
Experience with competitive quizzing, puzzle design, or puzzle-hunt construction.
Familiarity with JSON or structured data formats.

Work arrangement
No