$40,000 to $80,000 Mercor Research Fellowship
- Organization: Mercor
- Type: Fellowship
- Location: Global
- Deadline: September 26, 2026
- Funding: Fully Funded
Mercor, the San Francisco AI data company behind the APEX benchmarks, funds researchers for three or six months to build a new AI benchmark, evaluation method or economic study of their own design. You pitch the project in a one-page proposal; if selected you get a stipend, compute, paid expert time and weekly mentorship from the APEX research team, working remotely or from Mercor's San Francisco office. **What you get:** - A stipend of $40,000 for a 3-month term or $80,000 for a 6-month term, paid as a one-time stipend - Unlimited API credits plus a dedicated budget for GPU compute and paid expert and human-data time - Weekly one-to-one mentorship with a member of the APEX research team, plus access to the broader research organisation - Access to frontier model APIs, Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure and, where appropriate, real enterprise evaluation problems from Mercor's customers - Access to Mercor's marketplace and expert-network data for empirical work, subject to review - An optional desk in Mercor's San Francisco office for fellows who want to be in person - Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia - Standout fellows are considered for a full-time offer on the APEX research team at the end of the fellowship **What you'll do:** - Propose and scope a new benchmark, evaluation technique or economic study in an area not well covered by existing work - Build and validate it: for benchmarks, design task specifications and grading rubrics with Mercor's network of vetted experts, pilot tasks, calibrate scoring and run frontier models to analyse where they fail; for economic studies, design field experiments with experts on the platform or run empirical analyses of enterprise data - Publish the results as a paper, an open dataset, a new APEX leaderboard or a methodology the team adopts, working with Mercor's research and engineering teams - Commit at least 30 hours a week for 3 to 6 months, full time preferred, remotely or at the San Francisco office **Key dates:** - Applications close 26 September 2026 at 06:00 UTC, which is 23:00 on 25 September in San Francisco (Mercor's own announcement graphic says submit proposals by September 25) - Posting published 22 August 2026 - Fellowship terms run 3 or 6 months; the careers page describes admission as rolling **More information:** - Focus areas include long-horizon agentic tasks in law, finance and consulting, real-world software engineering evaluation, accounting and finance workflows, AI-for-science evals, new economic benchmarks, evaluation methodology, the economics of human data platforms and the AI theory of the firm; strong pitches outside the list are welcome - Applications are made through Mercor's Ashby job board with a resume, LinkedIn URL and a one-page proposal - Listed on Mercor's careers site as a Temporary, Remote position in the Research department, with San Francisco, New York City and London as listed locations
