Synthetic / Process Chemist

What you'll do

Mercor's chemistry red-team panel tests frontier AI models on one judgment: whether a technical request is ordinary professional chemistry or something else. The model should answer the first fully and decline the second. A model that refuses a routine scale-up or kinetics question fails just as surely as one that helps with a harmful one.

Each task is a three-step cycle:

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

Process chemistry is about as dual-use as the field gets: route knowledge that makes a medicine cheaper to produce is still route knowledge. Chemists who have made those calls in real development work are the point of this panel.

Who fits

Chemists who have run routes and scaled them from bench to pilot to plant. The ad lists:

• Synthetic route design and development in pharma, agrochemicals or fine chemicals
• Process chemistry and reaction engineering: optimisation, kinetics, impurity control
• Scale-up with the accompanying safety review
• Precursor sourcing, controlled-substance registration or regulatory chemistry
• Method development and troubleshooting in a GMP or equivalent quality environment

Red-teaming experience is preferred. The work is writing-intensive, with a rationale for every judgment that a non-specialist must be able to follow. Send a sample or link: a paper, a patent, or a development report summary you are allowed to share.

What it pays

$65–75 per task, as Mercor publishes it. No task length is stated, so what that means per hour depends on how quickly you move through the three steps. Time a handful before you plan around it.

Mercor's normal payment-terms block is missing from this listing, so payment schedule and visa eligibility are unstated. Confirm them when onboarding.

Before you apply

Classified or export-controlled information, and anything under NDA or prepublication review, is off-limits. This matters especially in pharma and agrochemical process work, where most real route data is proprietary. If you are bound by those obligations, flag them and the work will be scoped to fit.

You will spend long stretches reading and writing about misuse scenarios. Mercor briefs experts in advance and lets you pause or step away at any time without penalty.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Values hands-on scale-up judgment that is hard to find
• Welfare provisions stated upfront
• No country restriction published

Less good:

• Per-task pay with no published task length
• Payment schedule and eligibility not on the listing
• Your employer's proprietary route knowledge is strictly out of bounds, which narrows what you can draw on
• Extended 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, Industrial Hygienist / Process Safety Engineer, Analytical Chemist. See Mercor.