Academic Researcher

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

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