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Mercor · STEM & research

LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Post-Training)

Listed on Mercor as “LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Post-Training)

$100-$120/hrRemoteContractPaid in USD
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What this actually is

You design problems that stump current AI models, evaluate AI reasoning against the correct answer, write rubrics, and provide expert feedback. Often the highest-paid category because the expertise pool is small. The platform title (LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Post-Training)) reflects the rate band and the expertise required, not the day-to-day work.

Can you do this on your visa?

F-2 / F-4 / F-5 / F-6: open. E-1 to E-7: needs concurrent-employment permit. D-2 / D-4 students: S-3 permit, 20 hr/week cap. D-10 / D-8: case by case.

Korean tax on USD income

First 5 years in Korea: foreign-source income only taxed if remitted into Korea. After year 5: worldwide income. Full tax guide.

Original posting from Mercor

We're looking for experienced machine learning researchers with hands-on experience training and improving language models end-to-end. You'll work on well-scoped empirical open-ended LLM research problems.

**Responsibilities**

  • Train transformer-based language models from scratch and fine-tune open-weight models.
  • Get the most out of limited data and compute.
  • Construct training corpora from raw web-scale sources.
  • Build post-training pipelines.
  • Diagnose and resolve training issues.

**Requirements**

We are looking for candidates with strong expertise in one or more of the following areas:

Foundation Model Pre-training

Experience with:

  • Training transformer-based language models from scratch, end-to-end.
  • Data- and compute-constrained regimes: allocating a fixed budget across model size, tokens, and epochs.
  • Diagnosing optimisation failures, convergence issues, and training instabilities.

Pre-training Data

Experience with:

  • Corpus construction from raw web crawls and other large unfiltered sources.
  • Data filtering, deduplication, quality classification, and mixture/ordering optimisation.
  • Measuring data interventions rigorously.

LLM Post-Training

Hands-on experience with one or more of:

  • Supervised fine-tuning, including building your own datasets via synthetic generation, noisy or weak supervision, and rejection sampling.
  • Preference optimisation (DPO, RLHF, RLAIF) and reward modelling / human-preference prediction.
  • Alignment fine-tuning: shaping refusal behaviour, truthfulness, and unbiased reasoning while preserving general capability.
  • Fine-tuning for narrow, verifiable domains (math, code, games, structured prediction) where outputs can be checked programmatically.

Additional Areas of Interest

Experience in any of the following is a plus:

  • Scaling laws and training-efficiency research.
  • Curriculum learning and data ordering.
  • LLM evaluation: benchmark construction, contamination control, statistically sound comparisons.
  • Reinforcement learning for language models.
  • Model alignment and AI safety.

General Qualifications

  • 3+ years of machine learning research experience (PhD research counts toward this requirement).
  • Strong experience with PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow, or similar ML frameworks.
  • Degree from a top-100 university, experience at a FAANG or comparable AI company, or an equivalent research track record through publications or impactful open-source contributions.

**Why Join**

  • Work on cutting-edge foundation model research.
  • Collaborate with leading AI researchers on challenging, high-impact projects.
  • Flexible, project-based work with competitive compensation.

Quoted from Mercor’s public listing on 2026-07-21. We don’t edit platform copy; honest framing is in the title and the “what this actually is” block above.

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