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Mercor Verified
remote · hourly

LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Computer Vision & Adversarial Robustness)

$100–$120/hr
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Data Analysis hourly remote
Posted Aug 5, 2026

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

Responsibilities

  • Train image classifiers and generative image models from scratch, and fine-tune open-weight language models.
  • Get the most out of limited data, compute, and model-size budgets.
  • Make models robust — to adversarial inputs and to adversarial conversations.
  • Compress models to meet hard size and latency constraints without sacrificing accuracy.
  • Diagnose and resolve training issues.

Requirements

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

Adversarial Robustness

Experience with: - Adversarial training of image classifiers (e.g. PGD-based training, TRADES). - Evaluating robust accuracy under standard threat models (e.g. L∞ attacks, AutoAttack) and avoiding gradient-masking pitfalls. - Managing the robustness–accuracy trade-off and robust overfitting.

Efficient Computer Vision

Experience with: - Training image classifiers end-to-end, especially for fine-grained recognition (many visually similar classes, few examples per class). - Model compression: quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation from large teachers into small students. - Deploying models under hard size or latency budgets (on-device, edge, or embedded settings).

Generative Image Modeling

Experience with: - Training image generative models from scratch: diffusion models, GANs, VAEs, or flow-based models. - Iterating against sample-quality metrics such as FID. - Training-efficiency tricks that produce good generators quickly and at small parameter counts.

LLM Post-Training & Behavioral Robustness

Hands-on experience with one or more of: - Supervised fine-tuning and preference optimisation (DPO, RLHF, RLAIF) of open-weight language models, including building your own datasets via synthetic generation, noisy or weak supervision, and rejection sampling. - Shaping conversational behaviour over multiple turns: resistance to persuasion and sycophancy, calibrated confidence, and knowing when to accept corrections. - Alignment-style fine-tuning that changes a specific behaviour while preserving general capability.

Multilingual Pre-training

Experience with: - Training multilingual or low-resource-language models from scratch. - Tokenizer design across scripts and typologically diverse languages. - Balancing highly unequal per-language data (sampling temperatures, cross-lingual transfer) in data-constrained regimes.

Additional Areas of Interest

Experience in any of the following is a plus: - Scaling laws and training-efficiency research. - Curriculum learning and data ordering. - Model evaluation: benchmark construction, contamination control, statistically sound comparisons. - Uncertainty estimation and model calibration. - Data augmentation and synthetic data for robustness.

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 machine learning research.
  • Collaborate with leading AI researchers on challenging, high-impact projects.
  • Flexible, project-based work with competitive compensation.
Pay range
$100–$120/hr
40h/wk
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Earn $480 for each successful referral on this role.
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