Frontier Physics Researcher: Golden Reference Solutions

Mercor; United States; Remote; USD 110,208 - 185,976; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking expert physics researchers to author and verify golden reference solutions for the CritPt benchmark, a frontier research-level physics task. You will solve problems end-to-end with verifiable derivations, code, and references, or audit and adjudicate between parallel attempts to produce 100%-human-verified data used to evaluate LLMs on frontier physics reasoning.

Ideal candidates have PhD-level expertise, proficiency in LaTeX, Python, Jupyter, and SymPy, and a strong

Qualifications

• Hands-on familiarity with at least two canonical methods in the subfield.
• 3–5 representative publications (arXiv ID or DOI) preferred.
• Strong written English (B2/C1/C2).
• Experience solving research-level physics problems with derivations.

Responsibilities

• Solve research-level physics challenges end-to-end with derivations, code, and references.
• Decompose challenges into checkpoint sub-problems requiring physical reasoning.
• Author Python answer templates with auto-grading for symbolic or numerical outputs.
• Audit solutions for correctness, scope, and methodological soundness; give feedback.
• Adjudicate between parallel solver attempts and select the golden reference.
• Document chain-of-thought, error tolerances, and verification test cases.

Skills

LaTeX

Python

Jupyter

SymPy

English proficiency

Education

PhD in relevant subfield

Job description

Mercor is seeking expert physics researchers to author and verify golden reference solutions for the CritPt benchmark, a frontier research-level physics task. You will solve problems end-to-end with verifiable derivations, code, and references, or audit and adjudicate between parallel attempts to produce 100%-human-verified data used to evaluate LLMs on frontier physics reasoning.

Ideal candidates have PhD-level expertise, proficiency in LaTeX, Python, Jupyter, and SymPy, and a strong