Engineering PhD — AI Benchmark Question Architect

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 83,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Asynchronous work

Job summary

Mercor is seeking expert engineers to author and review high-quality academic assessment content for an AI research initiative. You will write and verify rigorous multiple-choice questions across core engineering domains, evaluate solution quality, and help establish gold-standard benchmarks used to advance AI capabilities.

This is a fully remote, asynchronous role with an expected commitment of 10+ hours per week.

Qualifications

• PhD or doctoral candidate in Engineering or closely related field.
• Master's degree considered for exceptional depth in a subdomain.
• Strong command of graduate-level engineering principles and applied mathematics.
• Excellent written English and ability to express complex ideas clearly.
• Professional licensure (PE) or relevant industry experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Author original engineering questions that test deep conceptual understanding.
• Ensure questions are unambiguous, self-contained, and precisely defined.
• Rate each question's difficulty: Medium, Hard, or Expert.
• Provide 1 correct answer and 9 plausible distractors.
• Write step-by-step Chain-of-Thought solutions with clear intermediate steps in markdown format.
• Supply 1–5 academic references per question from reputable sources.
• For verification tasks: flag issues with clarity, completeness, precision, or solvability and justify edits.

Skills

Question authoring

Question verification

Academic writing

English writing

Education

PhD in Engineering

Master's in Engineering

Job description

Mercor is seeking expert engineers to author and review high-quality academic assessment content for an AI research initiative. You will write and verify rigorous multiple-choice questions across core engineering domains, evaluate solution quality, and help establish gold-standard benchmarks used to advance AI capabilities.

This is a fully remote, asynchronous role with an expected commitment of 10+ hours per week.