Mercor
ML Research Engineer - PhD
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ML Research Engineer - PhD
Human Baseliner for Open-Ended ML Research Tasks
About The Role
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.
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Qualifications
Must-Have
- 3+ years of machine learning experience (PhD program time 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 (Proximal Policy Optimization)
- Reward shaping
- Fine-tuning
- LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)
- RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback)
- Architecture design
- Contrastive training
- Generative modeling
- Multilingual experience
- Data pipelines
Required Domain Expertise
Practical experience in:
- Pretraining
- Reinforcement learning
- Post-training
- Dataset curation
- Model architecture
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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 provided; no personal GPU required.
Application Process (Takes 20–30 mins to complete)
- Upload resume
- Complete AI interview based on your resume
- Submit form
Resources & Support
For further details:
- Interview process & platform info: Mercor Talent Docs
- Support inquiries: support@mercor.com
Note: Our team reviews applications daily—complete your AI interview and application steps to be considered for this opportunity.
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