Research Collaborator – STEM PhD Part-time NEW

Research Collaborator – STEM PhD

We are seeking high-caliber researchers and technical experts to join our team, focusing on Agentic workflows. The core objective of this role is to improve model performance in STEM topics by designing, validating, and analyzing challenging benchmark tasks.

Responsibilities:

• Task Design and Development: Design challenging, real-world data science problems.
• Content Generation: Integrate the problems into an Agentic development environment, preparing all necessary components using Python.
• Evaluation and Analysis: Evaluate the cross-model performance on the tasks.
• Headcount Identification: Identify tasks where target model fails to pass all tests.
• Loss Extraction: Analyze the agent steps (Agent Trajectory) to observe and extract core capability loss patterns from the model.

Qualifications and Recruitment:

• Applicants must have strong expertise in data science, ML, finance, or coding, with a deep background in frontier STEM.
• PhD students and recent grads from a top school is a plus.
• Availability of 30+ hrs per week on weekdays.
• Highly skilled and active Github contributions is a plus.

About Cincinnatus LLC:

Cincinnatus is an enterprise staffing company that partners with leading technology companies to source and employ highly skilled professionals for full-time and long-term contingent roles. Cincinnatus serves as the employer of record for these engagements, providing W-2 employment, payroll, benefits, and compliance, while placing employees directly within client teams to work on high-impact initiatives.

Roles hired through Cincinnatus are not project-based or freelance engagements. They are structured, role-based positions that typically involve full-time or fixed-term commitments, close collaboration with a client's internal teams, and integration into standard enterprise workflows.

Cincinnatus is a legal entity separate from Mercor. While opportunities may be discovered through Mercor's platform, employment, onboarding, payroll, and benefits for these roles are administered by Cincinnatus.

Equal Employment Opportunity:

Cincinnatus is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or any other legally protected characteristic.

Cincinnatus is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans throughout the job application process.

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.