ML Research Engineer - PhD
$75 - $90 per hourMercor
Job Description
Job Description
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: View email address on ziprecruiter.com
PS: Our team reviews applications daily. Please complete your AI interview and application steps to be considered for this opportunity.
Vacancy posted 9 days ago
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