Drug Discovery Scientist & AI Evaluation Architect

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

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.