AI Benchmark Scientist - Materials Science & Modeling (PhD)

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 83,000 - 138,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks and participate in a new benchmark for scientific computing. You will author original, executable research problems that frontier models cannot solve, focusing on materials science and related subdomains with coding.

The role involves sourcing material, crafting prompts, defining grading criteria, and calibrating models. This is a 6-week, part-time engagement requiring 20+ hours per week with immediate start.

Qualifications

• PhD in materials science or related field.
• Depth in semiconductor materials and molecular modeling.
• Proficiency in Python or R for scientific computing.
• Experience with Git/GitHub and Docker in PR workflows.

Responsibilities

• Source your own material from papers, datasets, repositories, or a scenario you design.
• Write scientific prompts based on the input.
• Build the grading criteria that define a correct answer.
• Calibrate against frontier models—a task ships only when strong models fail it more often than they succeed.

Skills

Python

R

Education

PhD in materials science

Tools

Docker

Git/GitHub

Job description

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks and participate in a new benchmark for scientific computing. You will author original, executable research problems that frontier models cannot solve, focusing on materials science and related subdomains with coding.

The role involves sourcing material, crafting prompts, defining grading criteria, and calibrating models. This is a 6-week, part-time engagement requiring 20+ hours per week with immediate start.