Nuclear Safeguards Expert - Red Team

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear domain experts to red-team frontier AI models. The task is to craft challenging prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels, and to evaluate model responses against a policy standard.

You will write reference answers and the technical reasoning behind them. This is a writing-intensive role requiring safeguards experience and the ability to explain complex judgments to non-specialists.

Qualifications

• Background in safeguards, nonproliferation, or related policy analysis.
• Experience writing technical material for non-specialist audiences.
• Strong ability to justify judgments with clear written rationale.

Responsibilities

• Write challenging single-turn prompts across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial.
• Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard.
• Draft reference answers and technical rationale explaining why responses are acceptable or not.

Skills

Red-teaming prompts

Technical writing

Policy evaluation

Nuclear domain knowledge

Education

Nuclear engineering background

Job description

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear domain 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.

Background we're looking for

We're looking for fuel-cycle depth plus some exposure to how material is controlled, accounted for, or diverted. Safeguards and nonproliferation experience is the strongest signal. The red-teaming task is to write prompts that pull a model past the boundary; the plausible research framing, the question that looks academic until you know what it's actually asking for — and then to explain in writing why the response was or wasn't acceptable. Examples of relevant backgrounds (Ideally w/Red-teaming experience):

• Safeguards Analyst / IAEA or Euratom Inspector — material accountancy, inspection regimes, Additional Protocol
• Nuclear Engineer, Fuel Cycle — enrichment, reprocessing and criticality, end to end
• Nuclear Security Engineer (national laboratory) — MPC&A, insider threat, physical protection design
• Nuclear Forensics Scientist — radioxenon monitoring, attribution, detection and characterisation
• Nonproliferation Analyst — export control, NSG trigger lists, acquisition and smuggling pathways

What the work requires

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.