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Synthetic / Process 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 route design that scales a medicine underpins a controlled compound; the same impurity profile that proves a clean process identifies how something was made. A model that refuses a routine scale-up or kinetics 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 chemists who have actually run routes and scaled them — bench to pilot to plant — and who know which requests are ordinary process chemistry and which are asking for something else. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same route knowledge that shortens a synthesis serves whoever is shortening it. 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):
- Synthetic route design and development in pharmaceutical, agrochemical or fine chemicals
- Process chemistry and reaction engineering — optimisation, kinetics, impurity control
- Scale-up from bench to pilot to plant, with the safety review that goes with it
- Precursor sourcing, controlled-substance registration or regulatory chemistry
- Method development and troubleshooting in a GMP or equivalent quality environment
- 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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