Mercor Research Fellowship — APEX
Remote • San Francisco • Temporary
Posted 23d ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
Temporary
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Mercor is seeking passionate individuals for its Research Fellowship, focusing on advancing AI evaluation and understanding its economic impact. This fellowship offers a unique opportunity to develop the next generation of benchmarks, evaluation techniques, and economic analyses of AI. Fellows will work directly with the APEX research team, gain access to real-world enterprise evaluation problems, and contribute to shaping industry standards for AI capability measurement. The program is designed for those with a genuine interest in evaluation as a research discipline and a desire to work in a fast-paced startup environment.
Responsibilities
- Propose and scope a new benchmark evaluation technique or economic study.
- Build and validate the proposed benchmark or study, including designing task specifications, grading rubrics, piloting tasks, calibrating scoring, and analyzing model performance.
- Publish results in the form of a paper, open dataset, new leaderboard, or adopted methodology.
- Partner with Mercor's research and engineering teams to integrate learnings into public work.
Requirements
- Genuine interest in evaluation as a research discipline.
- Background in economics, CS, ML, statistics, or an adjacent field (measurement, psychometrics, HCI, social science).
- A specific, well-scoped idea for a benchmark, eval technique, or empirical study.
- Comfortable in a startup environment with fast iteration and direct access to customer problems.
- Ability to commit at least 30 hours/week for the duration of the fellowship.
- Experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, or domain expertise in law, finance, medicine, or a scientific field is a bonus.
Benefits
- 3-month stipend of $40,000 or 6-month stipend of $80,000
- Unlimited API credits
- Dedicated budget for GPU compute
- Paid expert/human-data time
- Weekly 1:1 mentorship with a member of the APEX research team
- Regular access to the broader research organization
- Access to Mercor's marketplace and expert-network data for empirical work