Machine Learning Expert

What you'll do

• Come up with ideas for hard machine learning engineering tasks ("plans") for a long-horizon AI research project with a leading AI lab
• Design tasks hard enough to stump frontier models: a strong task is solved in no more than 2 out of 8 attempts
• Lean toward inference, evaluation and systems work rather than heavy model training. About half of the tasks run on GPU and half are CPU-only
• Explain clearly why each problem is hard for a frontier model
• You mainly contribute ideas. You do not need to build or review the tasks yourself

Must-haves

• Current or recent role as an ML research engineer, research scientist or applied scientist
• Hands-on experience personally training, fine-tuning or optimizing models in PyTorch or JAX
• Deep knowledge of at least one of these areas:
• LLMs: pretraining, alignment, evals
• GPU inference and performance: vLLM, Triton, CUDA, profiling
• Reinforcement learning (RL)
• Scientific ML: weather and climate, physics, biology
• Able to explain why a problem is hard for a frontier model

Nice-to-haves

• Experience writing benchmark or evaluation questions (a big plus)
• PhD in ML, CS or physics, or an MSc plus strong research output
• Publications
• Prior Mercor contracts with strong performance

Not a fit

• Software or full-stack engineers whose AI experience is mainly building LangChain or RAG applications
• Backgrounds limited to AI trainer, rater or annotator work

Where you can work

This role is 100% remote: you can work from any country except Andorra, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Barbados, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Bahamas, Bhutan, Belarus, Belize, DR Congo, Central African Republic, Congo (Republic), Cameroon, China, Cuba, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Dominica, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, Micronesia, Grenada, Georgia, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, Kiribati, Comoros, St. Kitts and Nevis, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Liberia, Lesotho, Libya, Moldova, Montenegro, Marshall Islands, Mali, Myanmar, Mauritania, Maldives, Malawi, Niger, Nicaragua, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Pakistan, Palestine, Palau, Russia, Solomon Islands, Seychelles, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Suriname, South Sudan, São Tomé and Príncipe, Syria, Eswatini, Chad, Togo, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Tonga, Tuvalu, Ukraine, Uganda, Vatican City, St. Vincent and Grenadines, Venezuela, Vanuatu, Samoa, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe.