Nuclear Engineer, Fuel Cycle

Mercor; India; Remote; INR 8,408,000 - 9,701,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

Referral rewards

Job summary

Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear materials and safeguards experts to red-team frontier AI models. The role focuses on writing challenging prompts across three levels—benign, dual-use, and adversarial—and evaluating model outputs against a policy standard.

You will write reference answers with technical reasoning and judge whether responses meet safety and correctness criteria. This contract position requires clear, documentable reasoning and prior technical writing or expert testimony as

Qualifications

• Backgrounds in the nuclear fuel cycle such as enrichment, reprocessing, fuel fabrication, and safety analyses.
• Ability to distinguish routine professional questions from potentially harmful inquiries.
• Strong technical writing skills and prior published work or expert testimony are preferred.

Responsibilities

• Write prompts that sit on the line between benign and potentially sensitive topics across three levels (benign, dual-use, adversarial).
• Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard and judge correctness.
• Draft reference answers and technical rationale explaining why a response is acceptable or not.
• Provide samples or links to prior writing work as part of the application.

Skills

Enrichment

Reprocessing

Fuel fabrication engineering

Criticality safety

Fuel cycle modelling

Safety licensing for fuel-cycle

Job description

Nuclear Engineer, Fuel CycleCompany: Mercor

Compensation: $65-$75 per taskCommitment: ContractLocation: RemoteReferral Reward: Earn up to $250 per successful referral.

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear materials and safeguards 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.

This domain lives on the dual-use line more than most. The same material-balance calculation that closes an inspector's account can be used to hide what is missing from it; the same fuel-cycle step that supplies a power reactor is the one a proliferation pathway runs through. A model that refuses a routine criticality-safety question is failing as badly as one that answers a question it shouldn't. Drawing that line reliably is why we need practitioners rather than generalists.

Background we're looking for

We're looking for people who have worked the fuel cycle itself — enrichment, reprocessing, fabrication, criticality safety — and who know which parameters are routine engineering and which ones only matter to someone going somewhere else with them.

What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else.

You will be writing prompts that sit exactly on that line, then judging whether the model held it.

Examples of relevant backgrounds (ideally with red-teaming experience):

• Enrichment, conversion or fuel fabrication engineering — process design, operations, throughput
• Reprocessing and back-end fuel cycle — separations, waste streams, spent fuel management
• Criticality safety engineer — criticality safety evaluations, limits and controls, accident analysis
• Fuel cycle systems analysis and modelling — material flows, cycle performance and economics
• Safety analysis or licensing for a fuel-cycle facility

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, 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.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.