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Nuclear Engineer, Fuel Cycle
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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 material-balance calculation that closes an inspector's account can be used to hide what is missing from it; the same fuel-cycle step that supplies a power reactor is the one a proliferation pathway runs through. A model that refuses a routine criticality-safety 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 the fuel cycle itself — enrichment, reprocessing, fabrication, criticality safety — and who know which parameters are routine engineering and which ones only matter to someone going somewhere else with them. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else. 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):
- Enrichment, conversion or fuel fabrication engineering — process design, operations, throughput
- Reprocessing and back-end fuel cycle — separations, waste streams, spent fuel management
- Criticality safety engineer — criticality safety evaluations, limits and controls, accident analysis
- Fuel cycle systems analysis and modelling — material flows, cycle performance and economics
- Safety analysis or licensing for a fuel-cycle facility
- 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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