What the work involves

This is not annotation piecework. You sit with the client's researchers and program managers and act as the clinical authority on what "correct" means. Day to day that breaks into four streams: reviewing clinical knowledge-work tasks and model outputs for thin reasoning, missing steps, and off-guideline or unsafe recommendations; writing instruction specs and producing golden solutions that a peer reviewer would sign off on; designing hard evaluation sets and benchmarks that show whether the model is actually improving rather than memorizing; and calibrating with researchers and experts in adjacent specialties so standards hold across contributors.

The hardest part of the job is the translation work. Much of what makes a clinician's answer right is tacit — the differential you ruled out silently, the guideline you know has an exception for this population, the reason a plausible-sounding management plan is wrong in practice. The role asks you to make that explicit and teachable in writing, repeatedly, in feedback that another expert or a model can act on.

What the platform screens for

Expect verification of the hard credentials first: MD or DO, completed residency, active unrestricted U.S. state licence, board certification, and 4+ years of post-residency attending-level practice (training years do not count). Beyond that, screeners probe for genuine specialty depth under follow-up — vague, textbook-level answers are the main failure mode — plus seniority with real ownership of clinical decisions, hands-on professional use of LLMs, and the ability to write precise structured critique rather than a verdict. Bay Area residency and willingness to work on-site are gates, not preferences.

Logistics

  • Not remote. Hybrid, Bay Area, California, on-site with the client's team multiple days per week when required. Relocation at your own cost if you are not already local; no relocation assistance.
  • Employment: full-time W-2 with Cincinnatus LLC, the employer of record, placed as extended workforce at the client. Payroll and benefits run through Cincinnatus, not Mercor.
  • Commitment: 40 hours per week, initial engagement of six months.
  • Tooling: client-issued accounts and equipment; you work inside the client's internal tools.
  • Observed band: $70–110/hr, as reported for this listing — specialty, seniority, and scope move the number, and it is not a guarantee.