What the work actually involves

You write prompts in Portuguese at the level of a specialist talking to another specialist — a synthesis question with a real reagent constraint, a cloning strategy problem, a radiation-shielding calculation — then read the model's answer and judge it. Judging means separating three things that often get conflated: whether the chemistry or biology is correct, whether the response was actually useful to the person asking, and whether it handled dual-use content responsibly. A third strand of the work is classification: applying a written rubric to sort prompts and conversations into categories, consistently, across hundreds of items. The rubric changes as the project matures, and reviewers expect you to follow the current version rather than your own instincts.

The safety dimension is the point of the project, not a footnote. You are expected to recognise when a plausibly academic question is a route to operational uplift, and equally to recognise when a question that sounds alarming is standard teaching material that a model should answer. Over-refusal and under-refusal both count as failures here, and screeners probe both directions.

What the platform screens for

  • Verifiable doctoral depth in one subfield — Mercor's screen tends to pick a technique you named and go two or three questions deeper. Depth in organic synthesis, molecular biology, virology, microbiology, genetics, radiochemistry, or nuclear chemistry beats a broad survey.
  • Genuine Portuguese scientific register — not conversational fluency, but the ability to write technical prompts in Portuguese without falling back on translated English phrasing. Either European or Brazilian Portuguese is generally in scope; say which is yours.
  • Dual-use judgment you can articulate — reasoning that distinguishes textbook-level explanation from actionable procedural detail, with examples from your own field.
  • Guideline discipline — willingness to grade to a rubric you may disagree with, and to flag ambiguity rather than resolve it silently.

Logistics

Fully remote and largely asynchronous, with work drawn from a queue and an immediate start. Portugal or wider Western Europe is a stated preference only; applicants elsewhere are welcome. Hours are flexible but throughput matters — most contributors commit a stated weekly block (often 10–20+ hours) and are asked to hold it consistently, since calibration suffers when contributors dip in and out. Expect an onboarding pass on the guidelines, some early sample-grading against reviewer consensus, and periodic re-calibration as the rubric is revised.