Application Guide
How to Apply for Mercor AI Capabilities Fund Grants
at Mercor
🏢 About Mercor
Mercor is a profitable Series C AI data company valued at $10 billion, organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy by connecting millions of domain experts with frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 enterprises. Working here means shaping the infrastructure that translates real-world professional expertise into AI capabilities, alongside researchers and operators at the forefront of the field. The company operates in-person five days a week in San Francisco, NYC, or London, and pays over $4 million per day to experts on its platform.
About This Role
This is not a typical job—it's a grant application for Mercor's $5M AI Capabilities Fund, which supports research into realistic evaluations, robust verification, and whether frontier AI is truly capable of delivering value in production settings. Successful applicants will receive funding and likely collaborate with Mercor's research and engineering teams to advance AI capability measurement and verification. The work directly addresses one of the industry's biggest gaps: bridging the divide between benchmark performance and real-world deployment success.
💡 A Day in the Life
You might spend your day designing a new evaluation protocol for a frontier model, collaborating with Mercor's researchers to refine metrics, and coordinating with domain experts on the platform to gather real-world data. Later, you could analyze results, draft a paper or report, and meet with the team to discuss how findings can be integrated into Mercor's enterprise offerings. Expect a fast-paced, in-person environment where your work directly influences how AI capabilities are measured and improved.
🚀 Application Tools
🎯 Who Mercor Is Looking For
- Demonstrated experience in AI capabilities research, particularly in designing or running realistic evaluations, benchmarks, or verification systems for frontier models.
- Strong track record of published research, open-source contributions, or deployed systems that measure AI's impact on professional work or real-world tasks.
- Ability to work in a fast-paced, deeply committed team environment, with a bias toward practical, production-relevant outcomes rather than purely academic metrics.
- Familiarity with Mercor's APEX benchmark family or similar efforts to quantify AI's professional impact, and a clear vision for how grant funding would advance this area.
📝 Tips for Applying to Mercor
Focus your proposal on realistic evaluations and verification—Mercor explicitly calls out these as critical gaps, so align your research goals with their stated priorities.
Reference Mercor's APEX benchmark family and explain how your work would complement or extend it, showing you understand their existing infrastructure.
Emphasize production relevance: demonstrate how your research will help determine whether frontier AI is capable enough for real-world settings, not just academic benchmarks.
Highlight any experience working with domain experts or translating human expertise into AI training data, as this is core to Mercor's mission.
Be specific about the time of experts you would need and how you would use the grant funding—Mercor supports the time of experts, so show you can leverage that resource effectively.
✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter
['Your vision for closing the gap between benchmark performance and real-world AI capability, with concrete examples of past work.', "How your research would leverage Mercor's unique position as a layer between human expertise and frontier models, including access to millions of domain experts.", 'Specific, measurable outcomes you aim to achieve with the grant, such as new evaluation methodologies, verification frameworks, or published benchmarks.', "Your ability to collaborate with Mercor's researchers and operators in a fast-paced, in-person environment (SF, NYC, or London)."]
Generate Cover Letter →🔍 Research Before Applying
To stand out, make sure you've researched:
- → Study Mercor's APEX benchmark family in detail—understand what it measures, its methodology, and its limitations.
- → Explore Mercor Enterprise and how it helps Fortune 500 companies capture and translate expert work into AI agents.
- → Read about Mercor's funding history, valuation, and recent announcements to understand their growth trajectory and strategic priorities.
- → Investigate existing AI evaluation frameworks (e.g., HELM, BIG-bench) and identify gaps that Mercor's grant could fill.
💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics
Based on this role, you may be asked about:
⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Proposing purely academic research that doesn't connect to production or real-world AI deployment—Mercor is explicitly focused on practical capability and verification.
- Ignoring Mercor's existing work (APEX, Enterprise) and proposing something redundant or disconnected from their infrastructure.
- Failing to specify how you would use the grant funding, especially the time of experts, or providing vague, unmeasurable goals.
📅 Application Timeline
This position is open until filled. However, we recommend applying as soon as possible as roles at mission-driven organizations tend to fill quickly.
Typical hiring timeline:
Application Review
1-2 weeks
Initial Screening
Phone call or written assessment
Interviews
1-2 rounds, usually virtual
Offer
Congratulations!