ML Research Engineer - PhD - AI Trainer

About the job Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco, our investors include Benchmark , General Catalyst , Peter Thiel , Adam D'Angelo , Larry Summers , and Jack Dorsey . Position: Human Baseliner for Open-Ended ML Research Tasks Type: Contract Compensation: $75–$90/hour Location: Remote Commitment: 20+ hours/week Role Responsibilities • Attempt open-ended machine learning research tasks under a fixed time and compute budget. • Work independently in a sandboxed Linux environment with internet access. • Use preferred tools, including IDEs and AI coding assistants like Cursor , Claude Code , and ChatGPT . • Record full working sessions via screen recording. • Complete pre-task and post-task questionnaires. • Submit final work product, screen recording, and completed questionnaires for evaluation. Qualifications Must-Have • 3+ years of machine learning experience . Time in a PhD program counts. • Attended a top-100 university or worked at FAANG or a comparable company . • Experience with PyTorch , JAX , or TensorFlow . • Deep expertise in at least one focus area: pretraining, PPO , reward shaping, fine-tuning, LoRA , RLHF , architecture design, contrastive training, generative modeling, multilingual experience, or data pipelines. Required Domain Expertise • Practical experience in Pretraining , Reinforcement learning , Post-training , Dataset curation , or Model architecture . Logistics • One baseline attempt per contractor per task. • Each task may only be attempted once. • All work is confidential and covered by NDA. • Compute and environment are provided; no personal GPU required. Application Process (Takes 20–30 mins to complete) • Upload resume • AI interview based on your resume • Submit form Resources & Support • For details about the interview process and platform information, please check: • For any help or support, reach out to: PS: Our team reviews applications daily. Please complete your AI interview and application steps to be considered for this opportunity. #hiring mercor Originally posted on Himalayas