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Chemical Defense Researcher
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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 toxicology that sets a countermeasure dose describes an exposure someone might intend; the same decontamination data that protects responders tells you what defeats it. A model that refuses a routine countermeasure or PPE 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 people who have worked chemical threats from the defensive side in an institutional setting — countermeasures, protection, detection, verification. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same agent properties that drive a treatment protocol drive a threat assessment. 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):
- Chemical defence research at USAMRICD, DoD, CDC or an allied national institute
- Toxicology of chemical warfare agents and medical countermeasure development
- Decontamination, protection and detection research for chemical threats
- CWC-related work — verification, destruction, designated laboratory analysis
- Consequence assessment and medical management of chemical exposure
- 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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