Physics PhD - Scientific Computing Expert

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.

Pay

$70/hour

Schedule

• Contract position
• Remote
• 6-week duration
• 20+ hours per week

Responsibilities

• Source material from published papers, Kaggle datasets, open-source repositories, or self-designed scenarios
• Write scientific prompts based on sourced input
• Build grading criteria to define correct answers
• Calibrate tasks against frontier models, ensuring tasks ship only when strong models fail more often than succeed
• Work independently and asynchronously to meet deadlines while improving AI model performance

Qualifications

Must-Have

• PhD in physics, applied physics, or a closely related field
• Demonstrated depth in at least two subdomains: condensed matter, optics, quantum information/computing, computational physics, astrophysics, particle physics
• Working proficiency in Python, R, or another relevant programming language for scientific computing
• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and running code in Docker

Preferred

• Publications in peer-reviewed journals
• Prior scientific software or research engineering experience

Start Date

Immediate