Chemistry Domain Expert at Mercor

Chemistry Domain Expert | $90-140/hr | Remote (US)

Help define how frontier AI models reason about chemistry. This role is for a practicing specialist rather than a generalist: your scientific judgment is the substance of the work. You will review chemistry reasoning tasks and model outputs, write the problem specifications and reference solutions that define what correct looks like, and design benchmarks that show whether a model is genuinely improving.

What you'll do

• Expert review: Assess chemistry tasks and model outputs, catching implausible mechanisms, infeasible reactions, stoichiometric and thermodynamic errors, misread spectra, and answers that read well but would not survive peer review.
• Problem specs and reference solutions: Write precise problem statements and rigorous reference solutions that reflect how research chemistry is actually done.
• Benchmarks: Design challenging, research-level problems and evaluation sets in your area of specialization.
• Calibration: Work with other researchers and experts in adjacent fields to turn tacit expert judgment into explicit, teachable criteria.

Requirements

• PhD in chemistry, chemical engineering, or a closely related field.
• A faculty appointment, principal investigator, staff or senior scientist, or an equivalent senior research role at a university, national laboratory, or research organization.
• Genuine specialization in at least one area, such as organic and synthetic chemistry, physical and computational chemistry, inorganic and materials chemistry, analytical chemistry, or chemical biology.
• A strong peer-reviewed publication record; competitive fellowships or awards are a plus.
• Hands-on use of large language models in your work, with the judgment to tell a sound argument from a plausible-sounding wrong one.
• Excellent written communication and the ability to give precise, well-structured feedback.
• Based in the United States.

Pay and location

$90-140/hr, hourly contract. Fully remote; you must be based in the United States.