mercor
Mercor Research Fellowship — APEX
Remote work allowed only within certain countries or regions.
Employer listed it 5 weeks ago · Added yesterday
Been open since 5 weeks ago, still being checked, but it has been live a while.
Salary
$40,000 to $80,000
Location
Timezone
Not stated
Contract
Contract
Experience
Mid
Category
Other
Published by the employer
Remote flexibility
Region Restricted
Remote work is allowed, but only for candidates based in United States, United Kingdom.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "San Francisco, New York City, London, Remote"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Applications outside the listed area are usually rejected
- Timezone overlap with the listed area is often expected
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
About the role
About Mercor
Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
About the Fellowship
Mercor’s APEX benchmark family measures whether frontier AI models can actually do economically valuable work: multi-hour agentic tasks in investment banking and corporate law, real professional accounting workflows, real-world software engineering, and graduate-level science. Every APEX benchmark is built and validated with Mercor’s network of domain experts — not written from a textbook.
Alongside APEX, Mercor's economics team works to understand how AI is changing the labor market and tries to quantify its economic impacts. To do so, we leverage Mercor’s unique access to data, including: a marketplace with millions of candidates, internal AI usage metrics, enterprise data, and more.
The Mercor Research Fellowship funds people to build the next generation of benchmarks, evaluation techniques, and economic analyses of AI. You can pitch a benchmark or eval methodology you want to build — a new domain, a harder task format, a better way to measure agentic reliability — and if selected, you get the time, compute, expert labor, and mentorship to design, implement, and release it end to end. Or, on the economics side, you can pitch a study using Mercor’s proprietary data to better understand an aspect of AI’s impact on the economy and firms.
You’ll work directly with the APEX research team, get access to real enterprise evaluation problems from Mercor’s Fortune 500 and frontier-lab partners, and see your work shape how the industry measures AI capability.
Program Details
Duration: 3–6 months, rolling admission
Commitment: minimum 30 hours/week; full-time preferred
Location: remote, or in-person at Mercor’s San Francisco office
Admission: apply with a specific benchmark or eval technique you want to build — the fellowship is funded around your pitch, not a generic research rotation
What You’ll Do
Propose and scope a new benchmark evaluation technique, or economic study in an area not covered well by existing work
Build and validate it. For benchmarks, that means designing task specifications and grading rubrics with Mercor's network of vetted experts — lawyers, accountants, engineers, scientists, consultants — then piloting tasks, calibrating scoring, and running frontier models to analyze where and why they fail. For economic studies, this can mean anything from designing and running field experiments with experts on our platform to conducting empirical analyses of enterprise data.
Publish your results : a paper, an open dataset, a new leaderboard on APEX, or a methodology the team adopts internally — and partner with Mercor's research and engineering teams to fold what you learn back into our public work.
Focus Areas
Long-horizon, multi-app agentic tasks in professional services (law, finance, consulting) — extending APEX-Agents
Real-world software engineering evaluation beyond issue resolution — extending APEX-SWE
Professional accounting and finance workflows — extending APEX-Accounting
AI-for-Science evals: research-level mathematics, biology, materials science, and theoretical physics
New economic benchmarks — negotiation, management, and other capabilities that carry economic value but resist standard task formats
Novel evaluation methodology: contamination resistance, rubric design, human-vs-model grading agreement, cost-adjusted scoring
Requirements
The employer hasn't listed requirements separately, they're described in the role summary above and on the original listing.
Benefits
- ·3-month stipend of $40,000 or 6-month stipend of $80,000
- ·Unlimited API credits, plus a dedicated budget for GPU compute and paid expert/human-data time
- ·Weekly 1:1 mentorship with a member of the APEX research team, plus regular access to the broader research org
- ·Access to Mercor's marketplace and expert-network data for empirical work, subject to review
- ·Access to frontier model APIs, Mercor’s internal evaluation infrastructure, and — where appropriate — real enterprise evaluation problems from Mercor’s customers
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, region restricted, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at mercor, mentioning your remote working experience.
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 1d ago. Last checked 23 Sept. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
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