Commercial Blasting Engineer - Expert

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor in San Francisco, CA is seeking a detail-focused professional to craft and judge prompts at the edge of safety for energetic materials and propulsion topics. You will write prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels and assess model outputs against a clear policy standard.

The role emphasizes precise written rationale, high-quality technical writing, and sustained work on misuses scenarios in a sensitive domain. NDA considerations and regulatory context apply.

Qualifications

• Must have written rationale for judgments that non-specialists can follow.
• Experience reading/writing misuse scenarios in a technical field.
• Background in blasting, storage, and transport of specialty materials is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Write challenging single-turn prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial classifications.
• Evaluate model responses against defined policy standards and judge handling quality.
• Create reference answers and technical reasoning for correct responses.

Skills

Red-teaming

Technical writing

Energetic materials knowledge

Regulatory compliance

Auditing experience

Education

Licensed blaster or blasting engineer

Engineering degree

Job description

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of energetic materials and propulsion 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 design that breaks rock for a highway cut is a description of directed energy release; the same magazine and transport rules that keep a crew safe are a map of where material sits and how it moves. A model that refuses a routine vibration-compliance 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 licensed practitioners who handle, store and move specialty materials as a daily responsibility, and who sign for them. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same inventory and transport detail that satisfies an auditor is what a diversion would exploit. 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):

• Licensed blaster or blasting engineer — mining, quarrying, construction or demolition
• Blast design and vibration control — timing, burden, seismograph monitoring, regulatory limits
• Magazine management, inventory reconciliation and transport of specialty materials
• Storage compatibility, security and regulatory compliance for a commercial licensee
• Training, certification or auditing of blasting crews

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.