Physics PhD - Scientific Computing Expert

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: Physics PhD Coding Experts Type: Contract Compensation: $70/hour Location: Remote Duration: 6 weeks Commitment: 20+ hours/week

Role Responsibilities

• Source material from published papers, Kaggle datasets, open-source repositories, or self-designed scenarios.
• Write scientific prompts based on sourced input.
• Build grading criteria to define correct answers.
• Calibrate tasks against frontier models, ensuring tasks ship only when strong models fail more often than succeed.
• Work independently and asynchronously to meet deadlines while improving AI model performance .

Qualifications Must-Have

• PhD in physics, applied physics, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated depth in at least two subdomains: condensed matter, optics, quantum information/computing, computational physics, astrophysics, particle physics.
• Working proficiency in Python , R , or another relevant programming language for scientific computing.
• Comfortable with Git/GitHub and running code in Docker .

Preferred

• Publications in peer-reviewed journals.
• Prior scientific software or research engineering experience.