History & Political Science Benchmark Specialist

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 65,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking experts in history and political science 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 history and political science domains, evaluate solution quality, and help establish gold-standard benchmarks used to advance AI capabilities.

You will be assigned one of two task types: Question Authoring — Create original, challenging multiple-choice questions in your area

Qualifications

• PhD or doctoral candidate in History, Political Science, International Relations, or closely related field.
• Master's degree considered for exceptional depth in subdomain.
• Strong command of historiographical methods, political theory, and comparative analysis.

Responsibilities

• Author original history and political science questions that test deep conceptual understanding, not surface-level recall.
• Ensure questions are unambiguous, self-contained, and precisely defined — all necessary information must be in the problem statement.
• Rate each question's difficulty: Medium (intro undergraduate), Hard (advanced undergraduate), or Expert (post-graduate and above).
• Provide 1 correct answer and 9 plausible but subtly incorrect alternatives that challenge expert-level solvers
• Write step-by-step Chain-of-Thought solutions with clear, concise reasoning in markdown format
• Supply 1–5 academic references per question from reputable sources (peer-reviewed journals, university repositories)
• For verification tasks: flag issues with clarity, completeness, precision, or solvability and justify any edits made

Skills

Excellent written English

Historiographical methods

Comparative analysis

Education

PhD or doctoral candidate in History/Political Science/IR

Master's degree considered for exceptional depth

Job description

Mercor is seeking experts in history and political science 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 history and political science domains, evaluate solution quality, and help establish gold-standard benchmarks used to advance AI capabilities.

You will be assigned one of two task types: Question Authoring — Create original, challenging multiple-choice questions in your area