Mercor · STEM & research
LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Computer Vision & Adversarial Robustness)
Listed on Mercor as “LLM Research Scientist (Pre-training & Computer Vision & Adversarial Robustness)”
How this rate compares
This listing
$100–$120 per hour
Typical in STEM & research
$70–$114 per hour
Within the typical range
Typical: the middle of the lowest and highest rates posted by 66 listings in this category on Seoulstart, in US dollars.
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 & Computer Vision & Adversarial Robustness)) reflects the rate band and the expertise required, not the day-to-day work.
How Mercor picks people
- Upload your CV and answer the role's written questions.
- Do a video interview with Mercor's AI interviewer. Most take about 20 minutes, in English unless the role says otherwise.
- Some roles add a skills test. A test you pass once counts for similar roles.
- The project team reviews your results and sends offers to the people it picks.
Before you start
- Take Mercor's free practice interview first. It does not count toward any application.
- Use Chrome on a computer with a camera and microphone, in a quiet room.
- You can retake an official interview up to 3 times, but hiring teams see how many times you retook it.
Not every applicant gets an offer. Prepare well for the interview.
How to prepare for the Mercor interview
Source: Mercor's help pages. talent.docs.mercor.com
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 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.
Quoted from Mercor's public listing on 2026-11-13. We don't edit platform copy; honest framing is in the title and the “what this actually is” block above.
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About Mercor
AI-interview-based talent network. One application, voice interview with their AI, then matched to projects across coding, research, and specialist work. Pay scales with track and seniority.
Mercor review: AI-interview talent network
4.1/5 on Glassdoor, fastest-growing platform in the category (+509% YoY). What the AI video interview actually asks, real pay across coding/research/medical/legal/finance tracks ($25-$200/hr), and the project-availability problem.
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