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Forensic Scientist — Nuclear Materials
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About the Role
Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear materials and safeguards 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 signature that attributes a sample is the one someone would want to suppress; the same detection limit that catches material moving can be read as a threshold to stay under. A model that refuses a routine measurement-methodology 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 characterised real nuclear material — detection, attribution, and the analytical work behind a defensible conclusion. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same signature that identifies a source tells you what to hide. 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):
- Nuclear forensics casework or international exercise participation — sample characterisation and attribution
- Radiochemical and mass-spectrometric analysis — isotopics, age dating, impurity and process signatures
- Detection and interdiction technology — portal monitors, handheld identification, search operations
- Material signature libraries, reference materials and attribution methodology
- Pre- or post-detonation forensics research at a national laboratory or agency
- 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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