What the work involves

You spend most sessions doing two things: authoring prompts in Chinese that probe how a model behaves around sensitive, politically charged, or dual-use subject matter, and applying a written taxonomy to classify prompts and multi-turn conversations. The prompts are not casual — they need to read as something a real, informed person would write, in natural Chinese, with the register and phrasing a native speaker would actually use. The classification half is closer to policy work: you read a conversation, decide which category it falls into under the guidelines you've been given, and write a short justification in English that another reviewer could audit without re-reading the whole exchange.

A recurring part of the job is spotting adversarial phrasing — the euphemism, the homophone substitution, the framing that makes a harmful request look like a homework question, the slow escalation across turns that no single message would trigger on. Chinese offers a lot of surface area for this, from character substitution and pinyin abbreviation to regional slang and internet coinages that shift meaning quickly. Recognising those moves, and explaining in English why they matter, is the core skill.

What the platform screens for

Mercor's screen is AI-led and conversational. Expect it to test genuine Chinese fluency rather than accept a claim of it, to probe whether your written English is clear enough for rationale-writing that a reviewer relies on, and to push on judgment: what you would do with a request that is uncomfortable but legitimate, or benign-sounding but clearly instrumental. Cultural and regional knowledge gets probed too — Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and diaspora usage differ, and the screen may check whether you notice. Prior AI or ML experience is not expected and claiming it thinly tends to hurt more than help.

Logistics

  • Fully remote and asynchronous; you pick your hours within task deadlines
  • Roughly 7 hours per week, part-time, with an immediate start
  • Hong Kong or wider East Asia is a stated preference, not a gate — applicants elsewhere are considered
  • Bachelor's degree completed or in progress
  • Observed pay band is $48–52/hr; rates on Mercor vary by project and are not guaranteed