Academic Research Collaborator – AI Model Evaluation

About the role

Mercor is seeking experienced academics to design and evaluate domain‑specific challenges for frontier AI models. This remote contract position allows professors, retired faculty, or PhD candidates to apply their expertise to real‑world problems in finance, law, econometrics, machine learning, and coding.

Key responsibilities

• Design challenging, real‑world problems in areas such as financial modeling, legal reasoning, econometrics, ML, and coding.
• Integrate these problems into an agentic development environment using Python.
• Prepare all necessary components for robust task execution.
• Evaluate model performance on the designed tasks and analyze outcomes.
• Identify and classify failures, focusing on logical reasoning issues.
• Collaborate with domain experts to ensure task relevance and accuracy.

Required profile

• Current or retired professor, or PhD student, in a STEM or quantitative discipline.
• Degree or PhD in progress from a top university.
• Working proficiency in Python applied in research, industry, GitHub, or coursework.
• Availability for 30+ hours per week on weekdays.
• Ability to work independently and manage time effectively.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Required skills

• Python

What we offer

• Contract rate of $80–$110 per hour.
• Fully remote work arrangement.
• Opportunity to influence cutting‑edge AI research.