ML Research Engineer - PhD

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.