Biology (PhD)

Fluent Language Skills Required: English

Why This Role Exists

Mercor partners with leading AI teams to improve the quality, usefulness, and reliability of general-purpose conversational AI systems. These systems are used across a wide range of everyday and professional scenarios, and their effectiveness depends on how clearly, accurately, and helpfully they respond to real user questions.

Life sciences AI must accurately reflect complex biological systems, experimental reasoning, and evolving scientific understanding. This project focuses on improving how models reason about and explain biological concepts across molecular, organismal, and systems-level topics.

What You’ll Do

• Write and refine prompts to guide model behavior in the life sciences context

• Evaluate LLM-generated responses to biology-related queries for scientific accuracy and reasoning quality

• Conduct fact-checking using authoritative public sources and domain knowledge

• Annotate model responses by identifying strengths, areas of improvement, and factual or conceptual inaccuracies

• Assess clarity, structure, and appropriateness of explanations for different audiences

• Ensure model responses align with expected conversational behavior and system guidelines

• Apply consistent evaluation standards by following clear taxonomies, benchmarks, and detailed evaluation guidelines

Who You Are

• You hold a PhD in Biology or a closely related life sciences field 

• You have deep expertise in one or more of the following sub-domains:

  • Molecular & Cellular Biology

  • Organismal Physiology & Development

  • Microbiology, Immunology & Pathobiology

  • Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology

• You have significant experience using large language models (LLMs) and understand how and why people use them

• You have excellent writing skills and can clearly explain complex life sciences concepts

• You have strong attention to detail and consistently notice subtle issues others may overlook

• Experience reviewing or editing technical or academic writing

Nice-to-Have Specialties

• Prior experience with RLHF, model evaluation, or data annotation work

• Experience teaching, mentoring, or explaining life sciences concepts to non-expert audiences

• Familiarity with evaluation rubrics, benchmarks, or structured review frameworks

What Success Looks Like

• You identify inaccuracies or weak mechanistic explanations for life science-related queries

• Your feedback improves the rigor, clarity, and correctness of AI explanations

• You deliver consistent, reproducible evaluation artifacts that strengthen model performance

• Mercor customers trust their AI systems in life sciences and biology contexts because you’ve rigorously evaluated them

Why Join Mercor

This role allows life sciences PhDs to apply their expertise to the development of high-quality AI systems, influencing how biology is explained and understood at scale.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

Contract and Payment Terms

• You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
• This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
• Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
• Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
• Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
• Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.