Drug Discovery Scientist

Mercor; United States; Remote; USD 70,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Claude Max subscription reimbursed

Job summary

Mercor seeks a senior researcher to design realistic, defensible evaluation frameworks for frontier AI models in drug research. You will build source-grounded data rooms and craft graders that assess substance over style, with a commitment to rigorous verification and revision as part of an ongoing workflow.

The role requires PhD-level expertise and the ability to defend complex reasoning, with a minimum 20 hours per week and up to 40. Access to Claude Code is provided and reimbursed.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent industry track record in mechanistic enzymology, structure-guided peptide/antibody design, fragment-based discovery, or structure-based medicinal chemistry.
• Ability to pose rigorous problems that resist shortcutting.
• Ability to judge reasoning quality, not just final answers.

Responsibilities

• Design the challenge — identify the hidden basin and forcing chain that makes one conclusion inevitable.
• Build the world — assemble a data room with real, source-grounded data; each decisive value traces to a real source.
• Write the grader — create a grading document that scores a memo on substance, not style or method.
• Validate it — perform verification and calibration before submission.
• Revise it — take ownership of rework if changes are requested.

Skills

Mechanistic enzymology

Structure-guided design

Fragment-based discovery

Reasoning quality assessment

Education

PhD or equivalent

Tools

Claude Code

Job description

About the role

This is an evaluation framework for frontier AI models in drug research and development. Domain experts write realistic research problems wrapped around messy evidence worlds. The model works offline in a sandbox with open-source scientific tooling, receiving incomplete, indirect and sometimes misleading data, and must reach a defensible conclusion. The answer is present in the evidence but never stated.

Your job is to build a research problem so realistic and well-constructed that the model has to genuinely reason to solve it — it can't pattern-match or look the answer up.

What you'll deliver

Three things per task: the prompt, the data room, and the grading document.

1. Design the challenge — identify the hidden basin and the forcing chain that makes one conclusion inevitable.

2. Build the world — assemble a data room from real, source‑grounded data. Every decisive value traces to a real source.

3. Write the grader — a grading document that scores a submitted memo on substance, not style or method.

4. Validate it — run verification and calibration before submission.

5. Revise it — you own the rework if a reviewer requests changes.

You are the final authority on every scientific and difficulty question in your task.

Who we're looking for

• Working expertise in mechanistic enzymology, structure‑guided peptide or antibody design, fragment‑based discovery, or structure‑based medicinal chemistry — PhD or equivalent industry track record.

• You can pose a problem whose answer you can defend rigorously, but which a strong solver cannot shortcut.

• Comfortable judging reasoning quality, not just final answers.

Commitment

Minimum 20 hours per week, up to 40.

Tooling

Work happens in a browser‑based studio plus Claude Code. A Claude Max subscription is required and is fully reimbursed.