Applied Physics Benchmark Specialist

About the Role

Mercor needs expert physicists to author and review academic assessment content for an AI research initiative. You will help build gold-standard benchmarks used to measure AI capabilities, and you are assigned either authoring or verification tasks.

Domains include semiconductor physics, nanoelectronics and spintronics, photonics, quantum optics and ultrafast science, quantum sensing and metrology, plasma physics and fusion energy, nonlinear dynamics and turbulence, and geophysics and reservoir simulation.

What You'll Do

• Authoring: write original, challenging multiple-choice questions that test deep conceptual understanding and rate their difficulty (Medium, Hard or Expert)
• Provide one correct answer and nine plausible but subtly wrong alternatives
• Write step-by-step chain-of-thought solutions in markdown, with 1-5 academic references
• Verification: review pre-written questions for clarity, completeness, precision and solvability, edit where needed and document your changes

Requirements

• PhD or doctoral candidate in Physics, Applied Physics, Astrophysics or a related field; a Master's may be considered with exceptional subdomain depth
• Strong command of graduate-level physics and mathematical formalism
• Experience with rigorous problem design or physics olympiad writing is a plus
• Excellent written English

Compensation & Logistics

Pay is $61-$77 per hour for an expected commitment of 10+ hours per week. Work is asynchronous and fully remote, with no location restriction stated.