Machine Learning Expert

Official role description

The research teams behind the best-known AI models come to Mercor for machine learning judgment they can't generate on their own. Your standards and expertise become the rubric that frontier AI is graded against.

This is a standing listing for machine learning practitioners who want AI training and evaluation work, not a specific job opening. It stays open whether or not a matching project is running this week.

New projects start on short notice, so instead of posting and pulling a listing each time, we keep one open per field and draw from it when one begins.

What the work looks like

We match machine learning practitioners in the network to projects like: • Writing a modeling problem from a system you actually shipped, with the data, the objective, and the constraint, plus the reference answer a model's attempt gets graded against • Grading model-written training and evaluation code: whether the loss matches the objective, whether the eval set leaks, whether the ablation supports the conclusion drawn from it • Flagging where a model proposes an approach that would train cleanly and still fail in production, given distribution shift, label noise, or a metric that rewards the wrong behaviour

Comparable machine learning projects have posted at $70 to $120 an hour, set per project by scope and depth.

What we're looking for • Professional experience training, evaluating, or deploying machine learning systems • Clear written communication, since most of the work involves explaining your reasoning • Comfort with ambiguous tasks, and willingness to flag unclear instructions

Where you trained matters less than whether you have put models in front of real users and dealt with what came back.

How it works

Apply here with your resume and confirm where you work from, then take a short AI interview, about 20 minutes total.

We verify your background and add you to the machine learning pool.

When a project needs machine learning expertise, we invite matching people from the pool to that specific listing. It names the rate, the hours, and the client, and any hiring decision is made there.

What to expect

This listing does not accept or reject candidates, so you will not get a decision on it. We reach out when a project matches your background. Depending on what our clients are running, that can be within a week or several months.

Finishing the domain expert interview and joining every network you qualify for both improve your odds of being matched. You only need to sign up once to be eligible across all of them.