Child & Adolescent Physician / Developmental Expert (Contract)

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're looking for physicians and developmental experts to help build a child safety benchmark for AI systems. You'll bring medical and developmental expertise to evaluating how AI responds to children and teens, including age-appropriate behavior, developmental risk, and situations involving safety or harm. This is a flexible, part-time contract for experts who want to apply their training to AI safety.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design realistic scenarios across developmental stages, from early childhood through adolescence

• Define evaluation criteria and scoring rubrics for safe, age-appropriate AI behavior

• Review and rate AI conversations for clinical, developmental, and safety risks

• Identify failure modes, such as missed risk signals, inappropriate content, or advice that ignores developmental stage

• Join calibration sessions with our researchers and engineers

REQUIREMENTS

• One of the following:

• MD/DO in child & adolescent psychiatry, developmental-behavioral pediatrics, pediatrics, or adolescent medicine (board certified or board eligible)

• PhD/PsyD in developmental psychology, clinical child psychology, or a closely related field, with clinical or research work on child development

• Current or recent direct work with children or adolescents (clinical, research, or both)

• Strong clinical judgment and clear written communication

• Comfort reviewing sensitive content and maintaining strict confidentiality

This role requires a medical or doctoral degree. Master's-level clinicians (LPC, LCSW, LMFT) should apply to our Adolescent Mental Health Clinical Expert role instead

NICE TO HAVE

• Child abuse or child protection evaluation experience

• Research on online safety, grooming or exploitation risk, or children and technology

• Experience building rating scales, assessment tools, or coding frameworks

ABOUT US

Vals AI builds rigorous evaluations and benchmarks for frontier AI systems. Our work started from NLP evaluation research at Stanford, and today we work across technical and domain-specific areas, including healthcare and mental health. Our team has backgrounds at Stanford, NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, HRT, Jane Street, and Snorkel.

We recently announced our $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors 8VC, Pear VC, and Bloomberg and new investors Hudson River Trading and NextLadder Ventures.

Vals in the Media:

• AI tools mostly fumble basic financial tasks, study finds https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/22/ai-tools-mostly-fumble-basic-financial-tasks-study-finds/

• The Winners (and Losers) of This New Vibe-Coding Benchmark Will Surprise You https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/the-winners-and-losers-of-this-new-vibe-coding-benchmark-will-surprise-you/91266938

• OpenAI’s Less-Flashy Rival Might Have a Better Business Model https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-business-model-ai-9e26b4ef

• Meta Announces New AI Model in Major Test of Company’s Ambitions https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-model-muse-spark-09ceeac5

• DeepSeek’s Sequel Set to Extend China’s Reach in Open-Source A.I. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/business/china-ai-deepseek-open-source.html