Pharmaceutical R&D Domain Expert

What you'll do

Unlike most Mercor gigs, this is a full-time, W-2 employment position with Cincinnatus LLC, a staffing company that acts as employer of record, placing you inside a leading AI lab's GenAI team as part of its extended workforce. You get client-issued accounts and equipment, and you work in the lab's own tools alongside its researchers and program managers.

The job is to make frontier models reason properly about pharmaceutical research and development. In practice:

• Data QA and review: vetting pharma knowledge-work tasks and model outputs for missing steps, thin reasoning, unsupported efficacy or safety claims, and answers that sound fine but would not survive scientific or regulatory scrutiny
• Instruction specs and golden datasets: writing the specs and the reference solutions to drug discovery and development problems, and defining new tasks that reflect how industry actually works
• Benchmarks: designing hard pharma tasks and evaluation sets, and helping build domain-specific skills and tools with the research team
• Calibration: working with researchers and adjacent specialists to turn tacit development judgment into explicit criteria

Compared with remote rubric work, the embedded setup means your feedback loop is much shorter: you sit with the people training the model, and the benchmarks you design are the ones they report against.

Who fits

• Education: PhD or PharmD in a relevant discipline (medicinal or organic chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, pharmaceutical sciences, toxicology), or an MD with substantive drug development experience
• Experience: 4+ years of pharma or biotech R&D at a drug company, biotech, CRO or translational institute. Purely academic research without drug development exposure is a weaker fit
• Specialisation in at least one pipeline stage: target ID and validation, med chem and lead optimisation, preclinical pharmacology and tox, translational and biomarker science, clinical development, or regulatory and CMC
• Seniority: Senior Scientist, Principal Scientist, Director or VP level, with real ownership of a discovery project or development program
• Research record (strongly preferred): publications, patents, or programs that reached the clinic
• AI fluency: everyday professional use of LLMs, and the judgment to spot a plausible wrong answer
• 40 hours a week, reliably, for an initial 6 months
• Excellent written feedback skills

Location

Hybrid, Bay Area, California. You must live there and work on-site with the client's team several days a week when required. If you live elsewhere you must relocate at your own cost before starting; no relocation assistance is offered. The ad is explicit that this is not a remote role.

What it pays

$75–115 per hour. At 40 hours a week that annualises to roughly $156,000–239,000 before tax. Payroll and benefits are administered by Cincinnatus as a W-2 employer; the ad does not describe the benefits package, and weekly Stripe or Wise payment terms are not published on this listing. Its clinical sibling, the Clinical Medicine Domain Expert, pays $70–110 on the same terms.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Genuine employment: W-2, payroll and benefits via Cincinnatus, rather than a contractor arrangement
• Embedded with an AI lab's research team, so your work has direct influence
• Full-time hours, with an initial 6-month engagement
• Rewards industry drug development depth over pure academic output

Less good:

• Senior pharma scientists in the Bay Area often earn more in industry; the low end of the band is a real pay cut for a Director
• Relocation at your own cost if you are not already local
• Six months initial term, with nothing published about what follows
• The lab is not named
• On-site days are "when required", so the actual hybrid pattern is unknown until you ask

About this listing

Found on Mercor, but employment, onboarding, payroll and benefits are run by Cincinnatus LLC, a separate legal entity. Confirmed open on 24 September 2026. The pay band, 40-hour commitment, 6-month term and Bay Area requirement are the ad's own. See Mercor.