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

Mercor
Data analysis
Remote
Contract

$100 to $120/hIndicative range provided by Mercor

Posted on August 5, 2026 · Applications until December 3, 2026

Apply on Mercor

I am sending you to the official Mercor page. Applying is free and in English.

I earn a commission from the platform when a candidate I referred gets hired. It changes nothing for you.

Tailor my resume to this job
Share this job

This remote role involves conducting open-ended machine learning research, including training vision and language models, improving adversarial robustness, and optimizing model efficiency. Candidates must have at least three years of research experience and strong proficiency in frameworks like PyTorch or JAX.

Description in English, as published by Mercor.

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.

15 openings

Open worldwide

About Mercor

Mercor is a US marketplace hiring remote experts for AI and consulting projects, from law to engineering. The original posting is on their site.

View this job on Mercor

Similar jobs

ML Challenge Task Auditor

Mercor
Data analysis
Remote
United States only
Contract

This remote role involves evaluating the quality, correctness, and methodological rigor of applied machine learning tasks to provide clear written feedback. Candidates need at least three years of hands-on applied machine learning experience and proficiency with standard frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.

Posted 66 days ago$70 to $90/h

Member of Technical Staff, Model Training (post-training research)

micro1
Sciences and research
Remote
Full time
Core team

This remote role involves researching and scaling advanced post-training methods, reinforcement learning, and fine-tuning techniques for large models. Candidates need strong foundations in machine learning, deep learning, and hands-on experience training large-scale models using Python and PyTorch.

  • Reinforcement Learning & Optimization
  • Post-Training Algorithms
  • Training Data Strategy & Curriculum Learning
  • +1

Posted 7 days ago$7 to $8/h

Member of Technical Staff, Model Training (applied research)

micro1
Sciences and research
Remote
Full time
Core team

The Member of Technical Staff for model training develops, adapts, and deploys specialized machine learning models for language, multimodal, and robotics applications. The role requires strong foundations in deep learning, practical experience with modern AI models, and proficiency in Python and PyTorch.

  • Model Training & Adaptation
  • Multimodal AI
  • Robotics & Agent Learning
  • +2

Posted 7 days ago$7 to $8/h

Machine Learning Researcher (MSc. or PhD)

micro1
AI and machine learning
Expert
Remote
Contract

The Machine Learning Researcher develops and validates models, training pipelines, and inference systems using Python. Candidates must hold an advanced quantitative degree and have strong experience using coding agents.

  • Machine Learning

Posted 11 days ago$60 to $120/h