- Experience
- Any
- Salary
- USD 80 – USD 110 / hour
- Openings
- 1
- Posted
- 1 day ago
- Work mode
- Work from home
- Education
- PhD in progress or degree from a top university
- Eligibility
- Current or retired professors and PhD students from STEM or professional/quantitative backgrounds, with a degree from a top university or a PhD in progress at a top university, who can work more than 30 hours per week on weekdays.
- Resume
- Required to apply
Job description
About the role
Mercor works with highly skilled creative and technical professionals and places them with leading AI research labs. The company is based in San Francisco and is backed by investors such as Benchmark, General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey.
Position
Academic Research Collaborator - Professors & PhDs
Compensation
Pay is set at $80 to $110 per hour.
Location
This role is fully remote.
Responsibilities
- Create demanding, real-world problems tailored to specific domains such as financial modeling, legal reasoning, econometrics, machine learning, and coding, with a focus on exposing core capability gaps in frontier AI systems.
- Set up those problems inside an agentic development workflow using Python and assemble the materials needed for reliable task execution.
- Assess how the target model performs on the assigned tasks and use the results to refine reasoning quality and output performance.
- Spot cases where the model cannot pass the tests and label those breakdowns as reasoning-related failures to inform future model improvements.
- Work alongside subject-matter experts to strengthen model training and keep the tasks accurate, relevant, and useful.
Qualifications
- Applicants should be a current or former professor, or a PhD student, in a STEM field or another professional/quantitative discipline.
- A degree from a top university, or a PhD that is currently in progress at a top university, is required.
- You should be comfortable using Python in research, industry, GitHub, or academic coursework.
- You must be able to commit reliably for more than 30 hours per week on weekdays.
- Strong self-management, independent work habits, and time management are expected.
- Clear verbal and written communication skills are important.
Preferred background
- Experience with AI training, model assessment, or data annotation is a plus.
Additional information
Details about the interview process and platform are available through the company’s documentation. Support is available by email. The team reviews applications every day, and candidates must complete the AI interview and application steps to be considered.