# Research Scientist, APEX Benchmarks at Mercor

- Company: Mercor
- What the company does: Mercor is organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy. We are powering frontier research, AI benchmarks, and AI agent training at scale for the top AI labs and enterprises. Backed by General Catalyst and Menlo.
- Company website: https://mercor.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $200K to $500K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-27
- Apply by: 2026-10-11
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/bebd78ce-5f12-46e9-a285-674e33838211
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/mercor-research-scientist-apex-benchmarks/

## About the role

We’re looking for a Research Scientist to lead the design of the next generation of APEX benchmarks and the expert-built datasets behind them.

## What they're looking for

- Research background in evaluation: Strong applied or academic research background in LLM evaluation, benchmarking, NLP or a related field, with a track record of rigorous experimental design
- Judgment about what to measure: You can look at a frontier model’s behavior and identify the measurement that would actually be informative, rather than the one that is easiest to build
- Statistical rigor: You reason carefully about sampling, variance, contamination and grader reliability, and you don’t ship a number you can’t defend
- Hands-on: Strong coding skills. You can build an eval harness, run the experiment and analyze the results yourself
- Exceptional communication: You can present complex technical findings clearly to frontier lab researchers and to non-technical audiences, in writing and in person
- Comfort with ambiguity: You’ve operated in fast-moving, cross-functional environments where the problem space is not yet defined

Tags: Research