Application scientist jobs in Hayward, CaliforniaCreate job alerts

Mercor is hiring experienced Python Engineers to support a variety of high-impact research collaborations with leading AI labs. Freelancers will help improve AI systems through work extending coding benchmarks that reflect real-world development across diverse languages and domains. This is a unique opportunity to apply your engineering expertise toward shaping the next generation of intelligent systems. Key Responsibilities - Develop and validate coding benchmarks in Python by curating issues, solutions, and test suites from real-world repositories - Ensure benchmark tasks include comprehensive unit and integration tests for solution verification - Maintain consistency and scalability of benchmark task distribution - Provide structured feedback on solution quality and clarity - Debug, optimize, and document benchmark code for reliability and reproducibility Ideal Qualifications - 3–10 years of experience as a backend software engineer, ML engineer, or applied data scientist - Degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field - Strong proficiency in Python - Experience with debugging, testing, and validating code - Comfortable with technical writing and attention to detail Project Timeline - Start Date: Immediate - Duration: 1 month - Commitment: Part-time (15–20 hours/week) - Schedule: Fully remote and asynchronous – flexible working hours Compensation & Contract - $80 per hour plus lucrative bonus per approved task (1 task takes approximately 1 hour to complete) - Median average pay inclusive of bonuses is $200/hr - Independent contractor - Daily payment via Stripe Connect Application & Onboarding Process - Upload your resume - AI interview: A short, 15-minute conversational session to understand your background, experience, and interest in the role - Brief assessment testing real-world coding ability, technical depth, and debugging approach - Follow-up communication within a few days with next steps and onboarding details About Mercor Mercor is a San Francisco-based company specializing in connecting elite professionals with cutting-edge AI initiatives. Our investors include Benchmark, General Catalyst, Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey. Thousands of professionals across engineering, research, and creative fields have partnered with Mercor on frontier projects shaping the future of AI. Apply today and leverage your software engineering expertise to help build the future of AI-driven systems!

Mercor is hiring experienced Go Engineers to support a variety of high-impact research collaborations with leading AI labs. Freelancers will help improve AI systems through work extending coding benchmarks that reflect real-world development across diverse languages and domains. This is a unique opportunity to apply your engineering expertise toward shaping the next generation of intelligent systems. Key Responsibilities - Develop and validate coding benchmarks in Go by curating issues, solutions, and test suites from real-world repositories - Ensure benchmark tasks include comprehensive unit and integration tests for solution verification - Maintain consistency and scalability of benchmark task distribution - Provide structured feedback on solution quality and clarity - Debug, optimize, and document benchmark code for reliability and reproducibility Ideal Qualifications - 3–10 years of experience as a backend software engineer, ML engineer, or applied data scientist - Degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field - Strong proficiency in Go - Experience with debugging, testing, and validating code - Comfortable with technical writing and attention to detail Project Timeline - Start Date: Immediate - Duration: 1 month - Commitment: Part-time (15–20 hours/week) - Schedule: Fully remote and asynchronous – flexible working hours Compensation & Contract - $90 per hour plus lucrative bonus per approved task (1 task takes approximately 1 hour to complete) - Median average pay inclusive of bonuses is $200/hr - Independent contractor - Daily payment via Stripe Connect Application & Onboarding Process - Upload your resume - AI interview: A short, 15-minute conversational session to understand your background, experience, and interest in the role - Brief assessment testing real-world coding ability, technical depth, and debugging approach - Follow-up communication within a few days with next steps and onboarding details About Mercor Mercor is a San Francisco-based company specializing in connecting elite professionals with cutting-edge AI initiatives. Our investors include Benchmark, General Catalyst, Adam D’Angelo, Larry Summers, and Jack Dorsey. Thousands of professionals across engineering, research, and creative fields have partnered with Mercor on frontier projects shaping the future of AI. Apply today and leverage your software engineering expertise to help build the future of AI-driven systems!

About the Company We are a seed-stage AI company building the industry standard for evaluating and benchmarking large language models on real enterprise tasks. About the Role As a Research Scientist, you will develop new benchmarks, methodologies, and evaluation pipelines that shape how cutting-edge models are assessed, compared, and deployed in production environments. Your work will directly influence model selection and safety decisions across foundation model labs, high-growth AI product companies, and Fortune-scale enterprises. Responsibilities Benchmarking & Model Analysis • Evaluate newly released models as they launch (e.g., Gemini, DeepSeek, etc.), • Run large-scale assessment workflows using internal evaluation infrastructure, • Compare model performance across enterprise-grade task categories Design New Benchmarks from Scratch • Identify high-value model application domains through research exploration, • Construct datasets, including labeling strategy and workforce coordination, • Write short “white-paper-style” summaries explaining benchmark purpose, method, and findings Advance Automated Evaluation Methodologies • Improve systems for scoring generated text beyond standard metrics, • Explore research in reference-free, rubric-based, and human-aligned evaluation, • Develop new techniques for reliability, consistency, and repeatability Cross-functional Collaboration • Work closely with engineering to scale evaluation infra, • Partner with customers to refine evaluation relevance and task fit, • Influence product direction through research insights Qualifications • 0–3 years post-grad experience (Master’s, PhD, or equivalent applied research), • Publications, preprints, or demos showing cutting-edge work, • Experience with diffusion models, NLP, multimodal, or benchmarking work, • Ability to operate independently with ambiguity, • Clean, maintainable research codebases, • Candidates from:, • top engineering/research universities, • applied AI startups, • well-regarded research internships Required Skills • Built or contributed to a benchmark or evaluation methodology, • Experience in enterprise task model evaluation, • Stanford / top lab adjacency (per their historical hiring success) Preferred Skills • Wants to publish as primary motivation, • Purely academic with slow timelines, • Big-tech culture fit concerns (Meta / Google / Salesforce specifically noted—but case-by-case) Pay range and compensation package • Base Salary: up to $250K depending on background, • Equity: typically 0.3% – 0.5%, flexibility for exceptional candidates, • Rapid equity refresh possible based on impact Equal Opportunity Statement Visa sponsorship available. Relocation support. Health & dental coverage. Lunch + dinner provided, snacks & coffee. Unlimited PTO. Weekly happy hours with community guests. Team events (bowling, hiking, rock climbing, etc.). Swag program (hats, etc.). Work Environment & Culture In-person, San Francisco HQ (required). Core hours: 9–5, some teammates extend voluntarily. Most team members work 1 weekend day per week (flexible). High-ownership, low-ego, collaborative. Live demos Mondays, team lunch Thursdays, community Fridays. Early-stage pace, applied focus—not academic publishing. Tech Environment (while research-focused, exposure beneficial) Backend: Python / Django. Frontend: React + TypeScript. Infra: AWS. Evaluation frameworks + internal tooling. Why This Role Is Unique The company already collaborates with foundation model labs, high-growth AI vertical product companies, and Fortune 500 enterprises (not publicly facing). ChatGPT Vals AI $5M seed raised, runway of 2+ years at current burn. Only one research scientist is being hired—true founding impact. Opportunity to define industry standards for model trust, reliability, and certification. Positioned to become the rating agency for generative AI.