Biology PhD — AI Evaluation Scientist & Coder

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 55,000 - 96,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks (Sci Code) for a benchmark in scientific computing. You will source material from papers, datasets, or open repositories and design scenarios for evaluation.

Responsibilities include writing prompts, building grading criteria, and calibrating tasks so frontier models fail more often than they succeed, with a strong emphasis on biology domains.

Qualifications

• PhD in biology, biological sciences, biochemistry, genetics, ecology, or closely related field.
• Demonstrated depth in at least two subdomains: ecology, biochemistry, genetics.
• Working proficiency in Python, R, or another relevant programming language for scientific computing.
• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and running code in Docker — authoring runs through a pull-request workflow with automated quality checks.

Responsibilities

• Source your own material: a published paper, a Kaggle dataset, an open-source repository, 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

Scientific computing

Education

PhD in biology

Tools

Git/GitHub

Docker

Job description

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks (Sci Code) for a benchmark in scientific computing. You will source material from papers, datasets, or open repositories and design scenarios for evaluation.

Responsibilities include writing prompts, building grading criteria, and calibrating tasks so frontier models fail more often than they succeed, with a strong emphasis on biology domains.