To qualify you must work as an ML research engineer, research scientist or applied scientist, and have personally trained, fine-tuned or optimized models in PyTorch or JAX.
What you'll do
- Come up with ideas for hard machine learning engineering tasks ("plans") for a long-horizon AI research project with a leading AI lab
- Design tasks hard enough to stump frontier models: a strong task is solved in no more than 2 out of 8 attempts
- Lean toward inference, evaluation and systems work rather than heavy model training. About half of the tasks run on GPU and half are CPU-only
- Explain clearly why each problem is hard for a frontier model
- You mainly contribute ideas. You do not need to build or review the tasks yourself
Must-haves
- Current or recent role as an ML research engineer, research scientist or applied scientist
- Hands-on experience personally training, fine-tuning or optimizing models in PyTorch or JAX
- Deep knowledge of at least one of these areas:
- LLMs: pretraining, alignment, evals
- GPU inference and performance: vLLM, Triton, CUDA, profiling
- Reinforcement learning (RL)
- Scientific ML: weather and climate, physics, biology
- Able to explain why a problem is hard for a frontier model
Nice-to-haves
- Experience writing benchmark or evaluation questions (a big plus)
- PhD in ML, CS or physics, or an MSc plus strong research output
- Publications
- Prior Mercor contracts with strong performance
Not a fit
- Software or full-stack engineers whose AI experience is mainly building LangChain or RAG applications
- Backgrounds limited to AI trainer, rater or annotator work
We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.
Contract and Payment Terms
- You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
- This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
- Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
- Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
- Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
- Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.
About Mercor
Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.
