Surety Underwriter - Bond Specialist

Obsidian; New York (NY); On-site; USD 90,000 - 135,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor, in partnership with a leading AI lab, is hiring Surety Underwriters and Bond Specialists to design realistic bonding scenarios and evaluate AI outputs against market standards. You will work with bid, performance, and payment bonds, provide credit analyses, and craft indemnity and collateral requirements.

You will read contractor financials and WIP schedules, translate findings into capacity and credit conclusions, and contribute to model refinement through feedback and calibration

Qualifications

• 2+ years of professional experience in surety underwriting, bond production, surety claims, or contract-surety credit analysis.
• Experience with multiple bond categories (contract, commercial, court, fiduciary, license and permit, subdivision).
• Ability to read contractor financial statements and WIP schedules and translate into capacity and credit conclusions.
• Understanding of three-party surety relationships and indemnity, collateral, subrogation vs insurance loss payments.

Responsibilities

• Design scenarios involving bid, performance and payment bonds and related capacity analyses.
• Create analyses, bond approvals, declinations and indemnity requirements.
• Write high-quality, reference responses for surety professionals.
• Grade AI-generated responses for credit judgment and contract accuracy.
• Identify misread financial statements and unrealistic bond strategies.
• Provide feedback to improve model behavior.
• Participate in onboarding hours and calibration sessions.

Skills

Surety underwriting

Bond analysis

Credit judgment

Attention to detail

Job description

About the Role

Mercor is partnering with a leading AI lab to train frontier models on high-quality insurance reasoning data. We're hiring Surety Underwriters & Bond Specialists to design realistic bonding, credit-analysis and bond-claim scenarios, evaluate model outputs against established market standards, and help shape how the next generation of AI reasons about contractor capacity, obligee requirements and default resolution.

We welcome contract and commercial surety underwriters, bond producers, surety claims professionals, and surety credit analysts from carriers, agencies, reinsurers and bond departments. Surety is a credit-driven discipline distinct from hazard underwriting, and this role reflects that.

What You'll Do

• Design realistic scenarios involving bid, performance and payment bonds, single and aggregate capacity, work-in-progress analysis, indemnity and collateral, commercial and court bonds, and bond-default resolution
• Create work products such as capacity recommendations, credit analyses, bond approvals and declinations, obligee form reviews, indemnity requirements and claim-resolution strategies
• Write "golden" reference responses at experienced surety-professional quality
• Grade AI-generated responses against structured rubrics for credit judgment, capacity reasoning, contract and bond-form accuracy, and default-resolution realism
• Identify misread financial statements, overstated capacity, confusion between surety and insurance obligations, mishandled obligee requirements, and unrealistic default or recovery strategies
• Provide written feedback the research team uses to improve model behavior
• Participate in onboarding office hours and calibration sessions

You're a Good Fit If You

• Have 2+ years of professional experience in surety underwriting, bond production, surety claims, or contract-surety credit analysis
• Have worked with at least one bond category, such as contract surety, commercial surety, court and fiduciary bonds, license and permit bonds, or subdivision bonds
• Can read contractor financial statements and work-in-progress schedules and translate them into capacity and credit conclusions
• Understand the three-party surety relationship and how indemnity, collateral and subrogation differ from insurance loss payment
• Demonstrate excellent written reasoning, commercial and credit judgment, and high attention to detail
• Can distinguish surety credit decisions from property-casualty risk underwriting and ordinary claim adjudication

Bonus Qualifications

• AFSB, CPCU, ARM, CPA, or comparable designation
• Both underwriting and surety-claims experience
• Experience with AIA and other standard bond forms, or with public-works statutory bond requirements
• Contractor default resolution: takeover, tender, financing or completion-agreement experience
• SBA bond guarantee, funds control, or small and emerging contractor program experience

Role Highlights

• Minimum 20 hours per week (ideally 40+)
• Role starts immediately, applications reviewed on a rolling basis