What the work involves

The core task is adversarial problem authoring. You draw on your own research or engineering background to construct questions that a state-of-the-art language model will plausibly get wrong — not trick questions or trivia, but problems that require multi-step reasoning, correct handling of edge cases, or domain knowledge that isn't cleanly summarized on the open web. Each submission typically bundles the prompt, a worked solution, the reasoning trace or derivation, and citations or justification a reviewer can independently check.

Day to day, expect a loop: draft a problem, test it against the model, discard it if the model solves it cleanly, tighten it if the model gets close, then document why the intended answer is correct and the model's answer is not. Reviewers push back on ambiguity, unverifiable claims, and problems that are hard only because they're vague. Volume matters less than defensibility — a small number of airtight items beats a large batch that needs rework.

What the platform screens for

Mercor runs an AI-led interview (roughly 20–30 minutes) plus a short work sample; the listing states up to one hour of onboarding time is paid if you're hired. The screen looks for a real credential — PhD or advanced degree, or equivalent industry depth — in medicine and healthcare, statistics and data science, AI/ML research, computer science, game development, or mechanical/aerospace engineering. Expect follow-up questions that go a layer deeper than your first answer, since the fastest signal of genuine expertise is how you handle being pressed on specifics. Written clarity is graded directly: the deliverable is writing.

Logistics

  • Fully remote and asynchronous; you pick your hours within project deadlines.
  • Hourly, tracked work — contributors commonly report part-time commitments in the 10–20 hr/week range, though this varies by project phase.
  • Geography is restricted to the U.S., UK, and Canada at this time.
  • Projects for frontier labs are batch-driven: work can arrive in bursts and pause between phases.