Mercor Research Fellowship — APEX

The Mercor Research Fellowship funds people to build the next generation of benchmarks, evaluation techniques, and economic analyses of AI. You can pitch a benchmark or eval methodology you want to build — a new domain, a harder task format, a better way to measure agentic reliability — and if selected, you get the time, compute, expert labor, and mentorship to design, implement, and release it end to end. Or, on the economics side, you can pitch a study using Mercor’s proprietary data to better understand an aspect of AI’s impact on the economy and firms.

Responsibilities

Propose and scope a new benchmark evaluation technique, or economic study in an area not covered well by existing work; Build and validate it by designing task specifications and grading rubrics with Mercor's network of vetted experts, piloting tasks, calibrating scoring, and running frontier models, or by designing and running field experiments and conducting empirical analyses of enterprise data; Publish your results: a paper, an open dataset, a new leaderboard on APEX, or a methodology the team adopts internally

Requirements

Genuine interest in evaluation as a research discipline; Background in economics, CS, ML, statistics, or an adjacent field (measurement, psychometrics, HCI, social science); A specific, well-scoped idea for a benchmark, eval technique, or empirical study; Comfortable in a startup environment; Able to commit at least 30 hours/week for the duration of the fellowship

Nice to have

Experience with agentic evaluation; RL environments; domain expertise in law, finance, medicine, or a scientific field

Benefits

3-month stipend of $40,000 or 6-month stipend of $80,000; Unlimited API credits plus a dedicated budget for GPU compute and paid expert/human-data time; Weekly 1:1 mentorship with a member of the APEX research team; Access to Mercor's marketplace and expert-network data for empirical work; Access to frontier model APIs and Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure; Optional desk in Mercor's San Francisco office; Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers; Standout fellows are considered for a full-time offer on the APEX research team