About the role
From Mercor’s listing.
Pay: $90 - $140/hour
Help define how frontier AI models reason about chemistry.
1. Overview
We are looking for senior chemists to improve how frontier AI models reason about real chemistry research.
Your scientific judgment is the substance of this role. You will review the quality of chemistry reasoning tasks and model outputs, write the problem specifications and reference solutions that define what "correct" looks like, and design benchmarks that show whether a model is genuinely improving. We are looking for a practicing specialist rather than a generalist.
This role is fully remote.
2. Key Responsibilities
- Expert review: Assess chemistry tasks and model outputs, catching implausible mechanisms, infeasible reactions, stoichiometric and thermodynamic errors, misread spectra, and answers that read well but would not survive peer review.
- Problem specs and reference solutions: Write precise problem statements and rigorous reference solutions that reflect how research chemistry is actually done.
- Benchmarks: Design challenging, research-level problems and evaluation sets in your area of specialization.
- Calibration: Work with other researchers and experts in adjacent fields to turn tacit expert judgment into explicit, teachable criteria.
3. Core Qualifications
- Education: PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering, or a closely related field.
- Seniority: A faculty appointment, principal investigator, staff or senior scientist, or an equivalent senior research role at a university, national laboratory, or research organization.
- Domain depth: Genuine specialization in at least one area, for example organic and synthetic chemistry, physical and computational chemistry, inorganic and materials chemistry, analytical chemistry, or chemical biology.
- Research record: A strong peer-reviewed publication record. Recognition such as competitive fellowships or awards is a plus.
- AI fluency: Hands-on use of large language models in your work, and the judgment to tell a sound argument from a plausible-sounding wrong one.
- Communication: Excellent written communication and the ability to give precise, well-structured feedback.
- Based in the United States.
How Mercor screens people
- 01Upload your resume and apply to a specific listing.
- 02Most listings ask you to complete a short AI-led video interview about your background.
- 03Some projects add a domain assessment before you are matched.
Before you apply
- No real platform charges you to apply or to “unlock” work.
- Apply to two or three platforms, not one. Acceptance is never certain.
- It’s contract work in projects. Hours vary week to week.
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