Emergency Response Specialist

What you'll do

Despite the generic title, this is a radiological role: Mercor is recruiting emergency response specialists for its radiological safety red-team panel. You would bring the planning and response side of radiation protection (drills, field monitoring, protective-action decisions) to testing how frontier AI models handle questions in that space. Emergency managers, public-health staff and local officials need clear answers during planning and exercises; a model that refuses those is failing. It should still decline requests that are really about causing an event.

Each task:

1. Write a single-turn prompt from emergency planning or response, labelled benign, dual-use or adversarial
2. Judge the model's response against a defined policy standard
3. Write the reference answer, with the reasoning behind it

Response specialists see the other side of the same models: the tools that tell a county which neighbourhoods to shelter are built on the same physics as a threat assessment. The job is to know when a consequence question is a planner's and when it is not, and to say so in writing.

Who fits

People who have planned for or responded to radiological events with real accountability. The ad's examples:

• Radiological emergency planning at a licensed facility or at state or national level
• Field response and monitoring (FRMAC, RAP, CBRN or national radiological teams)
• Consequence and dispersal modelling, dose projection, protective action decisions
• Incident command or response coordination for a real event or full-scale exercise
• Medical and public-health radiological response

Red-teaming experience is preferred. After-action reports and exercise plans make good evidence of the writing Mercor wants, if you can share them.

What it pays

$65–75 per task, Mercor's published band and the same as every radiological panel seat. The ad does not say how long a task takes.

No payment schedule or visa eligibility appears on the listing; confirm them during onboarding.

Before you apply

No classified or export-controlled information, and nothing under NDA or prepublication review. Many emergency plans are restricted or sensitive, so work from professional judgment rather than specific plans. Declare any obligations; Mercor says it will scope the work around them.

Expect sustained reading and writing about misuse scenarios. Mercor briefs experts first and allows you to pause or step away without penalty.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Opens the panel to public-health and emergency-management backgrounds, not only physicists
• Exercise and after-action writing experience is directly useful
• No country restriction published

Less good:

• The title undersells the radiological focus; check your background matches before applying
• Per-task pay with no stated task length
• Payment terms not on the listing

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026 and marked as a new opportunity. The same panel is recruiting a Nuclear Medicine Physicist / Cyclotron RSO. See Mercor.