Mercor
Research Intern
San Francisco · Intern · Internship
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 11 days ago
PythonMachine LearningData EngineeringAgentic AIStatisticsResearchExperimental DesignMentoring
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About the role
- As a Research Scientist Intern at Mercor, you'll work on research at the frontier of post-training, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), data generation, and model evaluation.
- You'll investigate how datasets, rewards, and training methods affect the capabilities and behavior of large language models.
- You'll work closely with research scientists, research engineers, and domain experts to turn open-ended questions into rigorous experiments.
Responsibilities
- Develop and investigate research questions related to post-training, RLVR, data quality, and model evaluation.
- Design and run controlled experiments to understand how datasets, rewards, and training strategies affect model performance.
- Develop methods for measuring data quality, usability, and performance uplift on key benchmarks.
- Design and evaluate datasets, rubrics, evaluators, and scoring frameworks for complex model capabilities.
- Build the research tooling and data pipelines needed to conduct experiments at scale.
- Collaborate with research scientists, research engineers, applied AI teams, and domain experts producing training and evaluation data.
- Demonstrated ability to formulate research questions, design experiments, and draw sound conclusions from empirical results.
- Your work will contribute to Mercor's research agenda and may support external publications, benchmark releases, and the development of frontier AI systems.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience in at least one of the following:
- Strong programming skills, particularly in Python, and the ability to write reliable research code.
- Comfort operating in a fast-paced research environment with rapid iteration and a high degree of ownership.
Nice to have
- Experience training, fine-tuning, or evaluating language models.
- Familiarity with RLVR techniques, reward modeling, or agentic AI systems.
- Research publications or submissions at competitive CS conferences such as ACL, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, or EMNLP.
- Research papers, technical reports, open-source projects, or other work samples demonstrating relevant skills.
- Impact: Your work powers how AI labs train and deploy their models
- Growth: Work with a high-velocity team where interns ship to production
- Mentorship from experienced researchers.
- Work on real, high-impact projects.
Benefits
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
- $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
- Currently pursuing a master's or PhD in computer science, machine learning, statistics, mathematics, or another relevant field.
Company info
- Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy.
- We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.
- Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models.
- Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work.
- Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies:
- helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
- Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement.
- Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team.
- You'll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society.
- Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion.
- We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
This listing is sourced directly from Mercor's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.