Commercial Blasting Engineer

What you'll do

This is the operator's seat on Mercor's energetic materials red-team panel. The panel checks whether frontier AI models can tell a working professional's question from a dangerous one. A quarry engineer asking about vibration limits or a site manager asking about storage compliance should get a full, useful answer; a request aimed at harm should not. Mercor scores an unnecessary refusal as a failure in its own right.

Each task:

1. Write a single-turn prompt grounded in commercial blasting practice, labelled benign, dual-use or adversarial
2. Evaluate the model's answer against a defined policy standard
3. Write the reference answer and explain the reasoning behind it

What makes a commercial licensee useful here is the accountability side of the job. You are the person who signs for material, reconciles inventory and answers to auditors and regulators, so you know which compliance questions are ordinary and which ones read differently once you ask why someone wants to know. The work is judging that line and writing down why.

Who fits

Licensed practitioners who handle and sign for specialty materials as part of daily work. The ad's examples:

• Licensed blaster or blasting engineer in mining, quarrying, construction or demolition
• Blast design and vibration control, including seismograph monitoring and regulatory limits
• Magazine management, inventory reconciliation and transport
• Storage compatibility, security and regulatory compliance for a commercial licensee
• Training, certification or auditing of blasting crews

Prior red-teaming is preferred, not required. The role is writing-intensive: every judgment needs a rationale a non-specialist can follow, and Mercor asks for a sample or link (incident reports, published work or expert witness experience all count).

What it pays

$65–75 per task, Mercor's published rate and identical to every other role on this panel. Task length is not stated, so work out your own hourly equivalent from the first few tasks. For a field professional used to day rates, the per-task model can land well above or well below that depending on pace.

The listing carries no payment-terms section, so the payment schedule and visa eligibility are not published. Confirm them before you start.

Before you apply

Nothing you contribute may come from classified or export-controlled sources, or from material under NDA or prepublication review. If you hold such obligations you can still apply; declare them and Mercor says it will scope the work to fit.

Mercor warns that you will read and write about misuse scenarios in your own field for long periods, briefs experts in advance, and lets you pause or step away without penalty.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Values field licensing and compliance experience, not just academic credentials
• Remote and flexible, with no country restriction published
• Welfare provisions are spelled out

Less good:

• Per-task pay with no published task length
• No payment schedule or eligibility terms on the listing
• Writing-heavy: fluent practitioners who dislike writing rationales will find it slow

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026 and marked as a new opportunity. See Mercor.