53 of the world's largest investors are scored by name on their AI capability. Your job is to make sure every number survives contact with the fund it describes.
ABOUT SPEC RESEARCH
SPEC Research is an independent research house on one mission: telling the world's largest investors which AI claims are real. We publish AIMI, the AI Maturity Index, scoring 27 sovereign wealth funds and 26 public pension funds on the AI they build and apply themselves, and The State of AI Alpha, a report on what AI actually delivers inside investment processes, built on a catalog of 100 scored papers. Every scored fund receives its scorecard and right of reply before the index prints.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Build the evidence pack behind each fund's score for the next AIMI edition: annual reports, regulatory filings, research output, hiring signals, public systems, with every claim tagged to its source.
- Score incoming academic and industry papers into the SPEC research catalog against the house rubric.
- Staff the right-of-reply desk in edition season: track fund replies, verify claimed corrections against the evidence, maintain the correction record.
- Research the evidence base for the next edition of The State of AI Alpha.
- Flag errors in the house's own published work; the correction record is public and we add to it without drama.
REQUIREMENTS
- Degree in finance, economics, statistics, computer science, or another quantitative field.
- 2+ years in investment research, manager due diligence, strategy consulting, or graduate-level academic research.
- Statistical literacy: you can read a methods section and judge a backtest, an out-of-sample claim, or a regression table without help.
- Working knowledge of current AI and machine learning: you understand what LLMs, supervised models, and production ML systems are, and can tell a deployment from a press release.
- Familiarity with institutional investors and their disclosures: annual reports, mandates, governance structures.
- Excellent written English: plain, precise, and sourced.
- Demonstrated citation discipline; you keep records that another researcher could audit.
- Self-directed: this is remote work with high autonomy and direct accountability for your trail.
PREFERRED
- CFA charter or progress toward it.
- Prior published research, academic or industry.
- Python or comparable data skills for processing filings at volume.
- Experience using LLM tools in a research workflow, with judgment about when not to.
- Arabic, French, or a Nordic language, matching funds the index covers.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Named contribution on research that lands on the desks of the funds it scores.
- Direct work with the principal on every piece.
- Remote, part-time contract; volume flexes around edition season.
HOW TO APPLY
Submit a CV and one paragraph on a public AI claim you believe is false and how you would check it. The paragraph carries more weight than the CV.