CAD / PCB / 3D Design Engineer — AI Evaluation

About the Role

Mercor is partnering with a leading AI lab to evaluate how well frontier AI models handle real engineering design work. We're hiring experienced CAD, PCB, and 3D design engineers to build challenging, realistic design tasks that reveal where current AI models fall short, across three tracks: mechanical CAD, electronics/PCB, and 3D/spatial-temporal work.

What You'll Do

• Turn real design work from your field into self-contained tasks, each with a prompt, input files (STEP, KiCad projects, .blend files, meshes), and an automated grader
• Build and refine tasks with an AI coding agent (Claude Code), versioned in Git
• Run tasks against frontier models, review the transcripts, and close loopholes until the task is fair and difficult for the right reasons
• Pass automated QA and peer review, documenting the rationale behind any synthetic data you create
• Attend onboarding and calibration sessions

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on design experience in at least one track: mechanical CAD (SolidWorks, AutoCAD, FreeCAD, or similar; Siemens NX/CATIA a plus), electronics/PCB (KiCad, DRC/ERC, footprints; RF/EM simulation a plus), or 3D/spatial-temporal (headless Blender via Python, PyVista/VTK)
• Shipped real deliverables such as fabricated boards, manufactured parts, production 3D assets, or published research
• A portfolio of your own design work (link required to apply)
• Comfortable writing Python, using the command line, and working with Git
• Able to judge whether a design is genuinely correct, not just visually plausible

Compensation & Logistics

• $60-$100/hr, remote, no stated location restriction
• Minimum 20 hours per week, active at least 5 days per week
• Role starts immediately; applications reviewed on a rolling basis