Academic Researcher - Fully Remote

About the role

Mercor is seeking experienced academics to collaborate on cutting‑edge AI research projects. This fully remote contract position allows professors, retired faculty, or PhD candidates to design and evaluate domain‑specific tasks that improve frontier AI models.

Key responsibilities

• Design challenging, real‑world problems in areas such as financial modeling, legal reasoning, econometrics, machine learning, and coding.
• Integrate these problems into an agentic development environment using Python.
• Prepare all components needed for robust task execution and evaluate model performance on the designed tasks.
• Analyze outcomes, identify failure modes, and classify logical reasoning issues to guide model improvements.
• Collaborate with domain experts to ensure task relevance, accuracy, and effective AI model training.

Required profile

• Current or retired professor, or PhD student, in a STEM or quantitative discipline.
• Degree or PhD in progress from a top university.
• Proficiency in Python demonstrated through research, industry work, GitHub projects, or coursework.
• Availability for 30+ hours per week on weekdays and ability to work independently.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Required skills

• Python

What we offer

• Contract compensation ranging from $80 to $110 per hour.
• Fully remote work arrangement.
• Opportunity to influence the development of frontier AI models.