Materials Science Expert

Role Overview

Mercor is partnering with leading AI labs on Project Atlas — an initiative to build realistic enterprise environments that frontier AI agents are trained and evaluated in. We're seeking experienced materials-science professionals from Fortune 500 R&D organizations, major national labs, and top R1 universities (e.g., Corning, 3M, DuPont, Dow, Intel, Applied Materials, national labs, leading materials-science departments) to recreate the digital workspaces they run every day and design the tasks that genuinely challenge state-of-the-art AI.

You'll bring your expertise in materials R&D, characterization, process development, or reliability engineering to build a high-fidelity environment that mirrors the tools, files, and workflows of a serious materials-science organization — and then author tasks grounded in the programs you actually run today.

Key Responsibilities

• Build a realistic digital workspace centered on the Drive folders you use day-to-day — the experimental write-ups, characterization reports, simulation results, technology transfer memos, IP disclosures, project proposals, and email threads that reflect how you actually organize your work — with some representation of the platforms that support it (e.g., VASP or Materials Studio (Biovia), LabVantage LIMS, ANSYS Fluent)
• Design multi-step tasks grounded in your real workflows that require navigating multiple apps, files, and stakeholders in a way that meaningfully challenges frontier AI agents
• Collaborate with other materials-science experts in your field to design the environment, shape task scope, and review each other's scenarios for realism and rigor
• Work asynchronously with research teams to refine task designs and evaluation criteria for materials-science agent benchmarks
• Contribute to frontier AI research and benchmarking — the work you produce directly informs how leading labs train and evaluate the next generation of AI systems

Ideal Qualifications

• MS / PhD in materials science, chemistry, physics, or related discipline
• 3+ years of full-time experience at a Fortune 500 R&D organization, national lab, or R1 university materials research group
• Background in one or more areas such as:
  • Metals, polymers, ceramics, composites, or semiconductor materials
  • Characterization (XRD, SEM/TEM, spectroscopy, thermal analysis)
  • Computational materials science / DFT / MD
  • Process development and scale-up
  • Reliability / failure analysis in advanced materials
• Day-to-day use of VASP / Materials Studio (Biovia), LabVantage / LabWare LIMS, and ANSYS Fluent / STAR-CCM+
• Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate materials-science workflows into structured task specs

Compensation Note

• Task Completion Pay: Competitive and based on task quality (~$900 – $1,250 per completed task, subject to change as the project evolves)
• Performance Bonus: Top performers receive a weekly bonus incentive on top of their per task rate!
• Hourly Opportunity: Top performers may be invited to transition to an hourly compensation model based on sustained quality and throughput.