Chemistry Expert

Pay: $65 – $105/hour
Commitment: Part time, ~40 h/week
Field: Life, Physical, and Social Science

The research teams behind the best-known AI models come to Mercor for chemistry judgment they can't generate on their own. Your standards and expertise become the rubric that frontier AI is graded against.

This is a standing listing for chemists who want AI training and evaluation work, not a specific job opening. It stays open whether or not a matching project is running this week.

New projects start on short notice, so instead of posting and pulling a listing each time, we keep one open per field and draw from it when one begins.

What the work looks like

We match chemists in the network to projects like:

• Writing a synthesis or characterization problem from your own work, with the substrate, the conditions, and the analytical data, plus the reference answer a model's attempt gets graded against
• Grading model-proposed routes and mechanisms: whether the disconnection is sensible, whether the selectivity claim is supported, whether the spectra match the structure assigned
• Flagging where a model proposes something that works on paper and fails in the flask, given side reactivity, workup losses, or what the reagent tolerates

Past rates have run $65 to $105 an hour, set per project by scope and depth.

What we're looking for

• A graduate degree in chemistry or a related field, with laboratory or computational research experience
• Clear written communication, since most of the work involves explaining your reasoning
• Comfort with ambiguous tasks, and willingness to flag unclear instructions

Where you trained matters less than whether you ran the reactions and interpreted the data yourself, recently enough to explain the calls you made.

How it works

Apply here with your resume and confirm where you work from, then take a short AI interview, about 20 minutes total.

We verify your background and add you to the chemistry pool.

When a project needs chemistry expertise, we invite matching people from the pool to that specific listing. It names the rate, the hours, and the client, and any hiring decision is made there.

What to expect

This listing does not accept or reject candidates, so you will not get a decision on it. We reach out when a project matches your background. Depending on what our clients are running, that can be within a week or several months.

Finishing the domain expert interview and joining every network you qualify for both improve your odds of being matched. You only need to sign up once to be eligible across all of them.