AI Research Prompt Engineer: Physics PhD (Remote)

mercor; United States; Remote; USD 83,000 - 110,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Physics PhD Coding Expert for a remote contract role. Work involves sourcing material, writing scientific prompts, and calibrating tasks for frontier models over a 6-week period, 20+ hours per week.

Immediate start; requires a PhD, strong Python/R, GitHub, and Docker skills; publications are a plus. This role supports AI research labs and emphasizes independent, high-quality evaluation work.

Qualifications

• PhD in physics, applied physics, or a closely related field.
• Depth in at least two subdomains: condensed matter, optics, quantum information/computing, computational physics, astrophysics, particle physics.
• Working proficiency in Python, R, or another relevant programming language for scientific computing.
• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and running code in Docker.

Responsibilities

• Source material from published papers, Kaggle datasets, open-source repositories, or self-designed scenarios.
• Write scientific prompts based on sourced inputs.
• Build grading criteria to define correct answers.
• Calibrate tasks against frontier models, ensuring tasks ship only when strong models fail more often than they succeed.
• Work independently and asynchronously to meet deadlines while improving AI model performance.

Skills

Python

R

Git

Education

PhD in Physics or related field

Tools

Docker

GitHub

Job description

Mercor is seeking a Physics PhD Coding Expert for a remote contract role. Work involves sourcing material, writing scientific prompts, and calibrating tasks for frontier models over a 6-week period, 20+ hours per week.

Immediate start; requires a PhD, strong Python/R, GitHub, and Docker skills; publications are a plus. This role supports AI research labs and emphasizes independent, high-quality evaluation work.