Mechanical Engineer

What you'll do

Unlike Mercor's freelance engineering evaluation listings, this one embeds you with an AI lab's research and programme teams for a full working week. You get client-issued accounts and equipment and work inside the lab's own tools.

The work falls into four strands:

• Data QA and review: checking mechanical engineering tasks and model answers for wrong assumptions, missing constraints, unit and tolerance errors, unsafe design choices, and answers that sound right but would fail a design review
• Specs and reference solutions: writing instruction specs, worked solutions and new tasks that mirror real engineering practice
• Benchmarks: building hard evaluation sets across mechanical design, thermal and fluid systems, structural and stress analysis, manufacturing and controls, and helping build domain tools with the researchers
• Calibration: agreeing standards with researchers and adjacent specialists, turning tacit engineering judgment into explicit criteria

Who qualifies

• A bachelor's degree or higher in mechanical engineering or a close discipline
• 5+ years of hands-on industry experience (product development, thermal and fluids, HVAC, stress analysis, manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, energy, robotics or medical devices all count)
• Real ownership of engineering work: designed components, ran FEA or CFD, released drawings, took products through review and production
• Fluency with tools such as SolidWorks, CATIA, NX, Creo, AutoCAD, ANSYS, Abaqus or MATLAB, and familiarity with ASME, ASTM, ISO and GD&T per ASME Y14.5
• Progression toward senior or lead responsibility; a PE is a plus, not required
• Hands-on professional use of LLMs, and the judgment to spot a confident wrong answer
• Must live in the United States

What it pays

$60–90 per hour. This is W-2 employment with Cincinnatus LLC, the employer of record, which handles payroll, benefits and compliance. That changes the maths compared with a freelance contract at a similar rate: tax is withheld and benefits are administered, so the effective value is higher than the same number paid to a contractor. The ad does not publish a payment schedule.

The commitment

40 hours a week, reliably, for an initial 2 to 3 months, with a strong possibility of extension. The ad is explicit that this is not project-based or freelance work. If you are still employed full-time elsewhere, this is not a side gig.

Worth knowing

Good:

• W-2 employment with benefits, rarer than contractor terms in this field
• No employer-size bar, unlike the freelance Mechanical Engineering Expert listing, which targets Fortune 500 engineers
• A PE is welcome but not required
• Direct contact with frontier-lab researchers

Less good:

• Full-time and US-only
• Initial term is only 2 to 3 months
• The lab is not named
• Pay placement within the $30 band is not explained

About this listing

Posted on Mercor's platform, read on 24 September 2026. Employment, onboarding, payroll and benefits run through Cincinnatus LLC, a legal entity separate from Mercor. Pay, hours, term and qualifications are from the ad. See Mercor.