Process Chemist - Route Design Expert

Mercor; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is assembling a panel of chemistry and chemical safety experts to red-team frontier AI models. You will craft challenging prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels and assess model outputs against a policy standard.

Beyond technical depth, this role stresses written justification for each judgment and clear communication to non-specialists. Experience in route design, scale-up, and regulatory chemistry is valued.

Qualifications

• Experience in synthetic route design and development.
• Familiarity with pharmaceutical/agrochemical or fine chemicals contexts.
• Ability to distinguish routine questions from dual-use inquiries.

Responsibilities

• Write challenging prompts across benign, dual-use, and adversarial levels.
• Evaluate model responses against a policy standard and document judgments.
• Draft reference answers with technical reasoning accessible to non-specialists.

Skills

Chemical synthesis knowledge

Technical writing

Critical reasoning

Education

PhD in Chemistry

Job description

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of chemistry and chemical safety 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.

This domain lives on the dual-use line more than most. The same route design that scales a medicine underpins a controlled compound; the same impurity profile that proves a clean process identifies how something was made. A model that refuses a routine scale-up or kinetics question is failing as badly as one that answers a question it shouldn't. Drawing that line reliably is why we need practitioners rather than generalists.

Background we're looking for

We're looking for chemists who have actually run routes and scaled them — bench to pilot to plant — and who know which requests are ordinary process chemistry and which are asking for something else. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same route knowledge that shortens a synthesis serves whoever is shortening it. You will be writing prompts that sit exactly on that line, then judging whether the model held it.

Examples of relevant backgrounds (ideally with red-teaming experience):

• Synthetic route design and development in pharmaceutical, agrochemical or fine chemicals
• Process chemistry and reaction engineering — optimisation, kinetics, impurity control
• Scale-up from bench to pilot to plant, with the safety review that goes with it
• Precursor sourcing, controlled-substance registration or regulatory chemistry
• Method development and troubleshooting in a GMP or equivalent quality environment

What this role demands beyond technical depth

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.