PhD Physicist Frontier Reasoning Trajectory Writer

PhD Physicist — Frontier Reasoning Trajectory Writer

Produce "golden trajectories" for hard physics problems: complete, step-by-step solution walkthroughs where every reasoning step is sound, the final answer is correct, and the work is organized around a sensible upfront plan. You'll work in Studio, iterate with a frontier LLM to draft and refine the reasoning, and produce trajectories that are clean enough to use as training data. The problems are provably hard — we screen them by running a frontier LLM on each problem five times and requiring it to fail at least once.

Domain Focus

We need physicists with a theoretical or computational specialization in one of:

• Astrophysics (theory / numerical)
• Condensed matter (theory)
• Quantum physics / quantum information
• Particle / high-energy physics

We are not looking for experimentalists, software engineers, or data scientists without a physics PhD background.

Requirements

• PhD in physics, or in the final 1-2 years of a PhD program, from a credible research institution
• Daily-driver fluency in LaTeX (for derivations) and Python (for numerical sanity checks and plotting)
• Comfort with iterative LLM workflows — willing to nudge models with hints, identify reasoning errors, and shape an exploration into a clean trajectory
• Detail-oriented; comfortable producing publication-grade derivations

Time Commitment

Around 15 hours per week, roughly one to two tasks per week. Each task averages about 7 hours of writer time.

Contract and Payment Terms

• You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
• This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
• Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
• Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
• Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
• Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.