Explosives Specialist - Incident Analyst

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor seeks a seasoned specialist to assemble and red-team prompts in energetic materials and propulsion, testing models for misuse potential while ensuring safe, legitimate use.

You will craft benign, dual-use, and adversarial prompts, judge model outputs against policy standards, and write a reference answer with technical reasoning for policy alignment.

Qualifications

• National certification background identifying materials and licensees.
• Ability to distinguish routine professional questions from sensitive inquiries.
• Strong written justification understandable by non-specialists.
• Experience reading/writing about misuse scenarios in your field.

Responsibilities

• Write prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels.
• Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard.
• Write reference answers with technical reasoning for correct behavior.

Skills

Red-teaming

Forensic writing

Policy analysis

Technical judgment

Education

Federally certified explosives specialist

National certification

Forensic laboratory experience

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 residue analysis that identifies what was used is a description of what to use; the same diversion indicators that catch a bad licensee tell someone how not to be caught. A model that refuses a routine forensic identification 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 people who have worked scenes and casework under a national certification — identifying materials after the fact, and inspecting the licensees who hold them. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same residue signature that closes a case describes a recipe in reverse. 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):

• Federally certified explosives specialist or national equivalent — scene and materials analysis
• Forensic laboratory identification of energetic materials and post-blast residues
• Post-incident analysis and reporting for an agency or laboratory
• Regulatory inspection of licensees and permittees — storage, records and diversion indicators
• Expert testimony or casework on energetic materials

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.