Energetic Materials Expert for Redteaming

About the work

Mercor is assembling a panel of explosives and energetic materials experts to red-team frontier AI models. The goal is to evaluate whether models correctly distinguish legitimate technical questions from requests with dangerous misuse potential.

What you'll do

• Write challenging single-turn prompts labelled as benign, dual-use, or adversarial.
• Evaluate model responses against a defined policy standard and judge whether each request was handled correctly.
• Write reference answers and explain the technical reasoning behind a correct response.
• Identify both inappropriate refusals of legitimate questions and unsafe responses to genuinely dangerous requests.

Background we're looking for

Mercor seeks both chemists with specialty materials expertise and engineers or operators with initiation and propulsion system experience. Prior AI evaluation or red-teaming experience is preferred. Relevant backgrounds include:

• Hazardous Device Specialist / Public Safety Professional: render-safe procedures and device assessment.
• Specialty Materials Chemist in pyrotechnics or propulsion: formulation, synthesis, and performance testing.
• Federal Certified Materials Specialist / Incident Analyst: forensic identification and scene analysis.
• Propulsion & Effects Engineer: munitions and propulsion system design.
• Commercial Blasting Engineer: specialty materials handling, storage, and transport.

Writing and wellbeing

This is writing-intensive work. Each judgment requires a rationale understandable to a non-specialist. Technical writing, incident or post-blast reporting, published research, or expert witness experience is a strong signal. Include a sample or link in your application.

The role involves sustained reading and writing about misuse scenarios. Experts receive an advance briefing and may pause or step away at any point without penalty.

Before you apply

• Compensation: $65–$75 per task, not per hour.
• Remote contract role.
• Work must not involve or draw on classified or export-controlled information, material covered by an NDA, or information subject to prepublication review obligations.
• Applicants with such obligations should disclose them so the work can be scoped appropriately.
• Mercor considers all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provides reasonable accommodations upon request.

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