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Analytical Chemist
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About the Role
Mercor is assembling a panel of chemistry and chemical safety experts to red-team frontier AI models. The goal is to test whether a model can correctly judge the misuse potential of a technical request — answering legitimate questions fully while refusing genuinely dangerous ones.
What You'll Do
- Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain, labelled across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial.
- Evaluate the responses that come back against a defined policy standard, and judge whether each was handled correctly.
- Write the reference answer — what a correct response looks like, and the technical reasoning for why.
- This domain lives on the dual-use line more than most. The same method that detects a hazardous compound at trace level defines the threshold someone would try to stay beneath; the same library entry that identifies an unknown tells you what a screen will and won't see. A model that refuses a routine method-validation question is failing as badly as one that answers a question it shouldn't. Drawing that line reliably is why we need practitioners rather than generalists.
You're a Good Fit If You
- We're looking for analysts who have built and validated methods for hazardous compounds — people who know what a detection limit really means and what it implies. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same detection method that finds a compound describes how to evade the screen. You will be writing prompts that sit exactly on that line, then judging whether the model held it.
- Examples of relevant backgrounds (ideally with red-teaming experience):
- Detection and identification of hazardous compounds — GC-MS, LC-MS/MS, IR, NMR
- Method development and validation for trace-level analysis
- Environmental, occupational or emergency-response sampling and analysis
- Reference standards, spectral libraries and unknown identification
- Laboratory accreditation, QA/QC and proficiency testing
- What this role demands beyond technical depth
Role Highlights
Pay & Payout
Independent contractor engagement. Apply via the link below - Mercor handles onboarding and pays weekly via Stripe or Wise.
Common Questions
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