Remote Applied Physics PhD — AI Question Designer

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 55,000 - 103,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking expert physicists 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 physics 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 of physics expertise, rate their difficulty,

Qualifications

• PhD or doctoral candidate in Physics, Applied Physics, Astrophysics, or a closely related field.
• Strong command of graduate-level physics concepts and mathematical formalism.
• Excellent written English and ability to express complex ideas clearly and concisely.
• Experience with rigorous academic problem design or physics olympiad writing is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Author original physics 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 intermediate steps 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

Problem design

Scientific writing

Conceptual physics

Education

PhD in Physics

Master's degree considered

Job description

Mercor is seeking expert physicists 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 physics 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 of physics expertise, rate their difficulty,