Remote Academic Research Collaborator (Prof/PhD)

mercor; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 152,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. This remote, contract role seeks an Academic Research Collaborator (Professors & PhDs) to design real-world tasks and evaluate model performance using Python, with collaboration across domains.

You will engage 30+ hours/week, independently manage time, and communicate findings clearly while supporting frontier AI research initiatives.

Qualifications

• Current or retired professor, or PhD student in STEM or quantitative domains.
• PhD in progress from a top university.
• Working proficiency in Python applied in research, industry, GitHub, or coursework.
• Ability to engage reliably for 30+ hours/week during weekdays.
• Basic ability to work independently and manage time effectively.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Design challenging, real-world domain-specific problems in areas like financial modeling, legal reasoning, econometrics, ML, and coding.
• Integrate problems into an Agentic development environment using Python. Prepare all necessary components for robust task execution.
• Evaluate the target model's performance on designed tasks. Analyze outcomes to improve model reasoning and outputs.
• Identify tasks where the model fails to pass tests. Classify failures as logical reasoning issues to guide future improvements.
• Collaborate with domain experts to enhance AI model training and ensure task relevance and accuracy.

Skills

Python

Communication

Time management

Independence

GitHub

Education

PhD in progress

Professor

STEM PhD/related

Tools

GitHub

Job description

Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. This remote, contract role seeks an Academic Research Collaborator (Professors & PhDs) to design real-world tasks and evaluate model performance using Python, with collaboration across domains.

You will engage 30+ hours/week, independently manage time, and communicate findings clearly while supporting frontier AI research initiatives.