Materials Science Expert

Mercor; United States; Remote; USD 83,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor seeks materials scientists for AI training and evaluation work. This is a standing listing, not a single opening, and it stays open when no project is active. We match experts to projects by scope, requiring you to write up the problem, provide datasets and reference answers, and then help grade model outputs.

Your clear written communication and ability to handle ambiguity are valued. New opportunities can appear with little notice, and past rates have run $60 to $120 an hour, set per

Qualifications

• A graduate degree in materials science or a related field.
• Clear written communication since most work involves explaining reasoning.
• Comfort with ambiguous tasks and willingness to flag unclear instructions.

Responsibilities

• Write up a materials problem with processing history and target property, and reference answer.
• Grade model-written structure–property reasoning to verify explanations.
• Flag where a model's proposed material meets the spec on paper but fails in service.
• Assist in assessing fatigue, corrosion, thermal cycling, or manufacturability impacts.

Skills

Graduate degree in materials science

Clear written communication

Comfort with ambiguity

Education

Graduate degree in materials science or related field

Job description

The research teams behind the best-known AI models come to Mercor for materials science judgment they can't generate on their own. Your standards and expertise become the rubric that frontier AI is graded against.

This is a standing listing for materials scientists who want AI training and evaluation work, not a specific job opening. It stays open whether or not a matching project is running this week.

New projects start on short notice, so instead of posting and pulling a listing each time, we keep one open per field and draw from it when one begins.

What the work looks like

We match materials scientists in the network to projects like:

• Writing a materials problem from work you have done, with the system, the processing history, and the property target, plus the reference answer a model's attempt gets graded against

• Grading model-written structure-property reasoning: whether the microstructure explains the property, whether the characterization supports the claim, whether the processing window is realistic

• Flagging where a model's proposed material meets the spec on paper and fails in service, given fatigue, corrosion, thermal cycling, or what can actually be manufactured

Past rates have run $60 to $120 an hour, set per project by scope and depth.

What we're looking for

• A graduate degree in materials science or a related field, with research or industrial experience

• Clear written communication, since most of the work involves explaining your reasoning

• Comfort with ambiguous tasks, and willingness to flag unclear instructions

Where you trained matters less than whether you processed and characterized the material yourself, recently enough to explain the calls you made.

What to expect

This listing does not accept or reject candidates, so you will not get a decision on it. We reach out when a project matches your background. Depending on what our clients are running, that can be within a week or several months.

Finishing the domain expert interview and joining every network you qualify for both improve your odds of being matched. You only need to sign up once to be eligible across all of them.