Industrial Hygienist / Process Safety Engineer

What you'll do

Mercor's chemistry red-team panel tests whether frontier AI models judge misuse potential correctly: answering legitimate safety questions fully and declining genuinely dangerous ones. Over-refusal counts as a failure too. A model that will not answer a routine exposure-limit question is useless to the safety professionals who need it.

Every task has the same three steps:

1. Write a single-turn prompt from your field, labelled benign, dual-use or adversarial
2. Evaluate the model's answer against a defined policy standard
3. Write the reference answer, with the technical reasoning for why it is correct

Industrial hygiene and process safety sit squarely on the dual-use line: the analysis that protects a workforce or a community is built from the same knowledge of how exposure and release happen. Your job is to draw that line where a practitioner would.

Who fits

People who have assessed real exposures and real process hazards and signed off on the controls. Backgrounds the ad names:

• Certified industrial hygienist: exposure assessment, sampling strategy, control banding
• Process hazard analysis: HAZOP, LOPA, what-if studies, management of change
• Toxic release and dispersion modelling: consequence analysis, AEGL/ERPG criteria, facility siting
• Ventilation, containment and PPE programme design for chemical hazards
• Regulatory compliance under PSM, Seveso, COMAH, OSHA or national equivalents

Red-teaming experience helps. Expect a lot of writing: every call needs a rationale a non-specialist can follow, so include a sample or link (a published paper, a PHA report summary, expert witness work).

What it pays

$65–75 per task, per Mercor. No task length is given, so your effective hourly rate depends on how fast you complete the prompt, evaluation and reference cycle. Time a few tasks before planning around it.

The listing omits Mercor's standard payment-terms block. Payment schedule and visa eligibility are therefore not stated; ask during onboarding.

Before you apply

Nothing classified, export-controlled, under NDA or subject to prepublication review may be used. If you carry those obligations, say so in the application and Mercor will scope the work to fit.

The material involves sustained reading and writing about misuse scenarios. Mercor briefs experts beforehand and lets you pause or stop at any point without penalty.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Uses PHA and exposure-assessment judgment that generalists do not have
• Welfare provisions for difficult content are stated upfront
• No country restriction published, and regulatory frameworks from the UK, EU and US are all named

Less good:

• Per-task pay with no published task length
• Payment timing and eligibility terms missing from the listing
• Long exposure to misuse scenarios

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote contract, confirmed open on 24 September 2026. Sister listings on the same panel: Forensic / Toxicological Chemist, Analytical Chemist, Synthetic / Process Chemist. See Mercor.