About this opportunity
Overview
Mercor is looking for chemistry and chemical safety experts to help red-team frontier AI models. The work focuses on testing whether a model can judge misuse potential correctly: answering legitimate technical questions fully while refusing genuinely dangerous requests.
This is a contract, remote opportunity for practitioners with real analytical chemistry experience, especially people who have worked with hazardous compounds, trace detection, and method validation. The role is writing-intensive and includes both prompt creation and response evaluation against a policy standard.
What You'll Do
- Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial.
- Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard and decide whether each response was handled correctly.
- Write reference answers that show what a correct response should look like, along with the technical reasoning behind it.
- Judge where the line falls between routine professional questions and prompts that appear to be seeking misuse-relevant information.
Background We're Looking For
Mercor is seeking analysts who have built and validated methods for hazardous compounds and understand what detection limits mean in practice. The key skill is distinguishing ordinary professional questions from ones that could be used to evade screening or misuse technical methods.
Relevant Experience
- Detection and identification of hazardous compounds using GC-MS, LC-MS/MS, IR, or 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.
What This Role Demands
- Strong technical writing ability, since every judgment needs a clear rationale that a non-specialist can follow.
- Prior technical writing, published research, or expert witness experience is a strong signal.
- Willingness to read and write about misuse scenarios in chemistry for sustained periods.
- Comfort working from advance briefings about the nature of the work, with the option to pause or step away at any point without penalty.
Important Notes
- The work must not draw on classified or export-controlled information.
- The work must not rely on anything covered by an NDA or prepublication review obligation.
- If you have such obligations, you can note that in your application so the work can be scoped appropriately.
