About this opportunity
Overview
Mercor is assembling a panel of chemistry and chemical safety experts to help red-team frontier AI models. The work focuses on testing whether a model can recognize misuse risk in technical requests, answer legitimate questions appropriately, and refuse genuinely dangerous ones.
This is contract, remote work. The role is intentionally centered on the boundary between routine technical analysis and dual-use misuse scenarios, so practitioners with real-world experience are especially important.
What You'll Do
- Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels.
- Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard and judge whether each response was handled correctly.
- Write reference answers that show what a correct response should look like, including the technical reasoning behind it.
Background We're Looking For
Mercor is looking for analysts who have built and validated methods for hazardous compounds and can distinguish routine professional questions from prompts that are trying to elicit misuse-relevant information.
- Detection and identification of hazardous compounds, including GC-MS, LC-MS/MS, IR, and NMR
- Method development and validation for trace-level analysis
- Environmental, occupational, or emergency-response sampling and analysis
- Reference standards, spectral libraries, and unknown identification
- Laboratory accreditation, QA/QC, and proficiency testing
Additional Requirements
- Strong technical writing ability, since each judgment requires a written rationale that a non-specialist can follow.
- Prior technical writing, published research, or expert witness experience is a strong signal.
- Applicants should be comfortable reading and writing about misuse scenarios for sustained periods.
- Work must not draw on classified or export-controlled information, or anything covered by an NDA or prepublication review obligation.
- If you have such obligations, you may still be a fit, but you should disclose them in your application so the work can be scoped appropriately.
Other Notes
Mercor briefs experts in advance on the nature of the work, and participants may pause or step away at any point without penalty. Reasonable accommodations are available upon request.
