Frontier CAD Design Engineer for AI Benchmarking

Mercor; Detroit (MI); On-site; USD 41,000 - 83,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is partnering with a leading AI lab to measure how frontier AI models perform real engineering design work. You will design realistic design tasks—prompt, inputs, and grader—and test them against frontier models to identify where AI falls short.

You’ll work across Mechanical CAD, Electronics/PCB, and 3D/Spatial-Temporal tracks, building tasks with CAD tools, KiCad, and Blender Python, then iterate with AI coding agents and Git versioning.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on design experience in at least one track
• For the Mechanical CAD track: hands-on professional experience with SolidWorks, AutoCAD, FreeCAD, or a comparable CAD tool
• Have shipped real deliverables: fabricated boards, manufactured parts, production 3D assets, or published research
• Can share a portfolio of your own design work (portfolio link required to apply)
• Write Python as part of your engineering work and are comfortable with the command line and Git
• Can judge whether a design is actually correct, not just whether it looks right

Responsibilities

• Turn real design work from your field into self-contained tasks: a prompt, input files (STEP, KiCad projects, .blend files, meshes), and an automated grader
• Build and iterate on tasks with an AI coding agent and version them in Git
• Run each task against frontier models, read the model transcripts, and close leaks and shortcuts until the task is hard for the right reasons
• Pass automated QA and peer review, and document the rationale behind any synthetic data you create
• Attend onboarding and calibration sessions

Skills

Python

Command line

Git

Education

BS/MS/PhD in Mechanical, Electrical, Aerospace, Robotics, Computer Graphics

Tools

SolidWorks

AutoCAD

FreeCAD

Siemens NX

CATIA

CadQuery

build123d

OpenCASCADE

trimesh

Open3D

Job description

Mercor is partnering with a leading AI lab to measure how frontier AI models perform real engineering design work. You will design realistic design tasks—prompt, inputs, and grader—and test them against frontier models to identify where AI falls short.

You’ll work across Mechanical CAD, Electronics/PCB, and 3D/Spatial-Temporal tracks, building tasks with CAD tools, KiCad, and Blender Python, then iterate with AI coding agents and Git versioning.