Research Intern

Job summary

Responsibilities

As a Research Scientist Intern at Mercor, you’ll work on research at the frontier of post-training, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), data generation, and model evaluation.

• Develop and investigate research questions related to post-training, RLVR, data quality, and model evaluation.
• Design and run controlled experiments to understand how datasets, rewards, and training strategies affect model performance.
• Study reward-shaping and post-training methods, including approaches such as GRPO and DAPO.
• Develop methods for measuring data quality, usability, and performance uplift on key benchmarks.
• Design and evaluate datasets, rubrics, evaluators, and scoring frameworks for complex model capabilities.

What they're looking for

• Currently pursuing a master’s or PhD in computer science, machine learning, statistics, mathematics, or another relevant field.
• Demonstrated ability to formulate research questions, design experiments, and draw sound conclusions from empirical results.
• Demonstrated experience in at least one of the following:
• Training, fine-tuning, or evaluating language models.
• Agentic AI system, RL environments

Tech stack

• Python