Materials Science Expert

**Role Overview**\n\nMercor 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.\n\nYou'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.\n\n**Key Responsibilities**\n\n- 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)\n \n- 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\n \n- 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\n \n- Work asynchronously with research teams to refine task designs and evaluation criteria for materials-science agent benchmarks\n \n- 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\n \n\n**Ideal Qualifications**\n\n- MS / PhD in materials science, chemistry, physics, or related discipline\n \n- 3+ years of full-time experience at a **Fortune 500 R&D organization, national lab, or R1 university materials research group**\n \n- Background in one or more areas such as:\n \n - Metals, polymers, ceramics, composites, or semiconductor materials\n \n - Characterization (XRD, SEM/TEM, spectroscopy, thermal analysis)\n \n - Computational materials science / DFT / MD\n \n - Process development and scale-up\n \n - Reliability / failure analysis in advanced materials\n \n- Day-to-day use of VASP / Materials Studio (Biovia), LabVantage / LabWare LIMS, and ANSYS Fluent / STAR-CCM+\n \n- Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate materials-science workflows into structured task specs\n \n\n**Compensation Note**\n\n- **Task Completion Pay:** Competitive and based on task quality (~$1,150 – $1,450 per completed task, subject to change as the project evolves)\n \n- **Performance Bonus:** Top performers receive a weekly bonus incentive on top of their per task rate!\n \n- **Hourly Opportunity:** Top performers may be invited to transition to an hourly compensation model based on sustained quality and throughput.