AI Research Collaborator - PhD

About the job

Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, our investors include Benchmark, General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Adam D'Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey.

Position: Academic Research Collaborator - Professors & PhDs
Type: Contract
Compensation: $80–$110/hour
Location: Remote

Role Responsibilities

• Design challenging, real-world domain-specific problems in areas like financial modeling, legal reasoning, econometrics, ML, and coding. Focus on addressing core capability loss failures in frontier AI models.
• Integrate problems into an Agentic development environment using Python. Prepare all necessary components for robust task execution.
• Evaluate the target model's performance on designed tasks. Analyze outcomes to improve model reasoning and outputs.
• Identify tasks where the model fails to pass tests. Classify failures as logical reasoning issues to guide future improvements.
• Collaborate with domain experts to enhance AI model training and ensure task relevance and accuracy.

Qualifications

Must-Have

• Current or retired professor, or PhD student, in STEM or professional/quantitative domains.
• Degree or PhD in progress from a top university.
• Working proficiency in Python applied in research, industry, GitHub, or coursework.
• Ability to engage reliably for 30+ hours/week during weekdays.
• Basic ability to work independently and manage time effectively.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Preferred

• Past experience in AI training, model evaluation, and data annotation.

Resources & Support

• For details about the interview process and platform information, please check: https://talent.docs.mercor.com/welcome
• For any help or support, reach out to: support@mercor.com

PS: Our team reviews applications daily. Please complete your AI interview and application steps to be considered for this opportunity.