Chemistry PhD Coding Experts

What you'll do

Computational chemists are well placed for this benchmark, because the field already lives in code: electronic structure calculations, basis set choices and convergence behaviour are exactly the places where a model can produce a confident, plausible and wrong answer. Mercor's "Sci Code" project with leading AI labs pays chemistry PhDs to build problems that expose that.

The steps are the same across the benchmark's domains:

• Choose a source yourself: a paper, a Kaggle dataset, an open-source repository or your own scenario
• Write a scientific prompt from it
• Define the grading criteria for a correct answer
• Test it against frontier models, and keep only tasks that strong models fail more often than they succeed

Tasks go through a pull-request workflow with automated checks, and code runs in Docker.

Who qualifies

• A PhD in chemistry, physical chemistry, theoretical chemistry, computational chemistry or a close field
• Demonstrated depth in both quantum chemistry and computational chemistry
• Working Python, R or similar for scientific computing
• Comfort with Git/GitHub and Docker

Publications and scientific software or research engineering experience are preferred.

Compared with the Material Science PhD Coding Experts sister listing, the two required subdomains here overlap heavily, so most theoretical or computational chemists will meet the bar naturally. A synthetic or analytical chemist without a computational track record will not.

What it pays and the commitment

A flat $70 per hour, the same as the materials science variant, paid weekly on Stripe or Wise.

• Duration: 6 weeks
• Commitment: part-time, 20+ hours a week
• Start: immediate

How to apply

Resume and application form, then a 25-minute conversational interview. Mercor says next steps follow within a few days.

Worth knowing

Good:

• A natural fit for computational chemists; the two subdomains overlap
• 182 hired this month, so the project is actively staffing
• Fixed rate and fixed six-week window
• Short interview, no stated take-home

Less good:

• Calibration against frontier models means many drafts will not ship
• $70 flat is modest for a PhD-gated role
• 20+ hours a week for six weeks
• H-1B and STEM OPT holders are excluded

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote hourly contract, read on 24 September 2026. Rate, duration, hours, requirements and payment terms are the ad's own. See Mercor.