ML Research Engineer - PhD
Mercor
Job Description
About the job Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, our investors include Benchmark , General Catalyst , Peter Thiel , Adam D'Angelo , Larry Summers , and Jack Dorsey . Position: Human Baseliner for Open-Ended ML Research Tasks Type: Contract Compensation: $75–$90/hour Location: Remote Commitment: 20+ hours/week Role Responsibilities Attempt open-ended machine learning research tasks under a fixed time and compute budget.
Work independently in a sandboxed Linux environment with internet access. Use preferred tools, including IDEs and AI coding assistants like Cursor , Claude Code , and ChatGPT . Record full working sessions via screen recording.
Complete pre-task and post-task questionnaires. Submit final work product, screen recording, and completed questionnaires for evaluation. Qualifications Must-Have 3+ years of machine learning experience .
Time in a PhD program counts. Attended a top-100 university or worked at FAANG or a comparable company . Experience with PyTorch , JAX , or TensorFlow .
Deep expertise in at least one focus area: pretraining, PPO , reward shaping, fine-tuning, LoRA , RLHF , architecture design, contrastive training, generative modeling, multilingual experience, or data pipelines. Required Domain Expertise Practical experience in Pretraining , Reinforcement learning , Post-training , Dataset curation , or Model architecture . Logistics One baseline attempt per contractor per task.
Each task may only be attempted once. All work is confidential and covered by NDA. Compute and environment are provided; no personal GPU required.
Application Process (Takes 20–30 mins to complete) Upload resume AI interview based on your resume Submit form Resources & Support For details about the interview process and platform information, please check: https://talent.docs.mercor.com/welcome For any help or support, reach out to: support@mercor.com PS: Our team reviews applications daily. Please complete your AI interview and application steps to be considered for this opportunity.