Health Physicist

What you'll do

Mercor wants hands-on health physicists for its radiological safety red-team panel: people who have done surveys, assays and dose planning themselves in facilities where mistakes matter. The panel tests whether frontier AI models give accurate, complete answers to the radiation protection questions technicians, students and safety staff ask every day, and whether they decline the narrow set of requests aimed at misuse. A refused dose or shielding question from a working technician is scored as a failure.

Each task:

1. Write a single-turn prompt from operational health physics, labelled benign, dual-use or adversarial
2. Grade the model's reply against a defined policy standard
3. Write the reference answer, with the physics behind it

Health physics is a field where almost everything is published, taught and essential to worker safety, which makes over-refusal the more common model failure. Practitioners know what a routine ALARA or survey question looks like and can argue in writing why a model should have answered it, as well as spotting the rare case that should have been declined.

Who fits

Practitioners who have done the measurement and planning work directly. The ad's examples:

• Operational health physics at a DOE site, national laboratory or reactor facility
• Internal dosimetry and bioassay, including dose reconstruction
• Decommissioning health physics: characterisation surveys, MARSSIM, release criteria
• Accelerator or reactor health physics, including shielding design and verification
• Dose planning for high-hazard work: RWPs, ALARA reviews, hot-cell and glovebox operations

Red-teaming experience is preferred. Certified health physicists and those with published technical work have natural writing samples to offer.

What it pays

$65–75 per task, Mercor's published band for every radiological panel seat. Task length is not stated. Contract health physicists used to hourly D&D rates should time a few tasks before comparing.

The listing gives no payment schedule or visa eligibility terms.

Before you apply

No classified or export-controlled information, and nothing under NDA or prepublication review. Site-specific data from DOE facilities often falls under one of those; declare any obligations and Mercor says it will scope the work to fit.

You will engage with misuse scenarios for sustained periods. Mercor briefs experts beforehand and lets you pause or step away without penalty.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Broad range of operational backgrounds qualify, from D&D to accelerators
• A field where your judgment helps models stop refusing useful safety questions
• No country restriction published

Less good:

• Per-task pay with no stated task length
• Site data and procedures are likely off limits
• Payment terms not on the listing

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026. Also on the radiological panel: Source Security Specialist, Emergency Response Specialist and Nuclear Medicine Physicist / Cyclotron RSO. See Mercor.