Explosives Specialist - Fully Remote

Mercor; Sydney; Remote; AUD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor, based in Sydney, seeks chemists with specialty materials expertise or engineers with initiation and propulsion system experience to join a red-team evaluating frontier AI models for misuse potential. You will craft challenging prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels and document a clear rationale for each judgment.

Past roles include hazardous device specialists, specialty materials chemists, incident analysts, propulsion engineers, or blasting engineers.

Qualifications

• This is writing-intensive work. Every judgment you make needs a written rationale that a non-specialist can follow.

Responsibilities

• Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain, labelled across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial.
• Evaluate the responses against a policy standard and judge whether each was handled correctly.
• Write the reference answer and the technical reasoning for why.

Job description

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of explosives and energetic materials experts to red-team frontier AI models. The goal is to test whether a model can correctly judge the misuse potential of a technical request: Answering legitimate questions fully while refusing genuinely dangerous ones.

You will:

• Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain, labelled across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial.
• Evaluate the responses that come back against a defined policy standard, and judge whether each was handled correctly.
• Write the reference answer; what a correct response looks like, and the technical reasoning for why.

Models tend to fail this domain in both directions: refusing routine questions a mining engineer or investigator asks daily, then engaging with a request they should have shut down because it arrived in academic clothing. Knowing which is which takes someone who has done the work.

Background we're looking for

We're recruiting across two profiles and need both: chemists with specialty materials expertise, and engineers or operators with initiation and propulsion system experience. Prior AI evaluation or red-teaming experience is preferred. Relevant backgrounds include:

• Hazardous Device Specialist / Public Safety Professional — render-safe procedures and device assessment.
• Specialty Materials Chemist (pyrotechnics or propulsion) — formulation, synthesis and performance testing.
• Federal Certified Materials Specialist / Incident Analyst — forensic identification and scene analysis.
• Propulsion & Effects Engineer — munitions and propulsion system design.
• Commercial Blasting Engineer — specialty materials handling, storage and transport.

What this role demands beyond technical depth

This is writing-intensive work. Every judgment you make needs a written rationale that a non-specialist can follow. Prior technical writing, incident or post-blast reporting, published research, or expert witness experience is a strong signal; please include a sample or link.

You will also be reading and writing about misuse scenarios in your field for sustained periods. We brief experts on this in advance, and you can pause or step away at any point without penalty.

Before you apply

Your work here will not involve, and must not draw on, classified or export-controlled information, or anything covered by an NDA or prepublication review obligation. If you hold such obligations you may still be a good fit; tell us in your application and we will scope the work accordingly.