Disease-Area Clinician — Trial Endpoints & Prescribing

$150–230/hrrate as listed

Mercor is recruiting US-based, board-certified practising physicians to build and critique rubrics that AI systems use to analyze commercial drugs and drug-development programs. The work centers on reading trial endpoints and judging, in your own therapeutic area, whether a result would actually change how you prescribe.

Summary, eligibility guidance and screening preparation are prepared by Sidequest from the platform's posting. Check the source listing before applying.

What the work involves

You'll be handed drugs and development programs — some marketed, some mid-pipeline — and asked to build rubrics that define what a competent analysis of them looks like. That means specifying which endpoints matter, what effect sizes are clinically meaningful versus statistically decorative, what the comparator should have been, and where a program's story diverges from its data. You'll also critique rubrics and model outputs written by others, flagging the plausible-but-wrong: surrogate endpoints treated as hard outcomes, subgroup findings promoted past their evidentiary weight, safety signals underweighted, or uptake assumptions that ignore payer behavior, administration burden, or the entrenched standard of care in your clinic.

The recurring judgment call is prescribing translation. Given a readout, would you change practice — and for which patient, at what line of therapy, against what alternative? Answers that stay at the abstract level are the most common failure mode here; the work rewards clinicians who can say specifically what they'd do differently on Monday and why.

What the platform screens for

Verifiable credentials. Board certification and active US practice are checked, along with your specialty and typical patient mix.
Therapeutic-area depth under follow-up. Screens push past the first answer: name the pivotal trials in your area, their design weaknesses, and the disputes that remain live among specialists.
Development-program literacy. Comfort with phase structure, regulatory pathways, accelerated approval and confirmatory-trial dynamics, and how commercial positioning shapes trial design.
Written reasoning. Rubric work is prose. Clear, decisive, well-caveated writing matters more than volume.

Logistics

Remote and US-based, asynchronous, roughly 10–20 hours across a one-to-two week pilot. Work is self-scheduled around clinical duties; expect a short calibration session or written brief up front and occasional reviewer feedback loops. Pay in this category has been observed in the $150–230/hr range, set per engagement and not guaranteed. Strong contributors are typically invited back as the project scales.

What they look for

MD or DO, board-certified and actively practising in the US
Deep expertise in a defined therapeutic area
Fluency interpreting clinical trial endpoints, design, and statistics
Familiarity with biotech/pharma drug-development programs and regulatory pathways
Clear written analytical reasoning for rubric and critique work
Working knowledge of real-world uptake drivers: payers, access, administration burden

Before you apply

Would you pass this screen?

Drawn from what this listing actually requires. Answered in your browser — nothing is sent to us, and we do not store your answers.

Are you a licensed, actively practising physician (MD or DO) currently based in and licensed to practise in the United States?
Active US-based physician (MD/DO) · required
Are you board-certified (or board-eligible and working toward certification) in your stated therapeutic area?
Board-certified in specialty · required
Have you spent at least 2 years actively prescribing or managing patients in your stated therapeutic specialty?
Disease-area depth · required
Have you had any exposure to biotech or pharma drug-development programs — through trials, advisory boards, consulting, or clinical practice — that familiarized you with how endpoints and programs are evaluated?
Biotech/pharma exposure · preferred

0 of 4 answered

Included with this listing

Interview prep — 10 questions

Matched to what this platform's screening actually measures. Answer each out loud in 60–90 seconds: claim → concrete example → implication.

What it tests: Whether the clinician can distinguish clinically meaningful from statistically significant endpoints, and how they actually translate trial data into treatment decisions for real patients.
A strong answer: The answer names specific endpoints (e.g., progression-free survival, symptom burden, mortality) relevant to their specialty, explains why some moved the needle clinically while others didn't, and connects the interpretation to a concrete prescribing choice or patient population discussion.
Where people lose it: Treating all trial endpoints as equally important, or reciting endpoints without explaining which ones would actually shift prescribing behavior — reveals unfamiliarity with how trial results land in clinical practice.