Public Health Expert

Role Overview

Mercor is partnering with leading AI labs on Project Atlas — an initiative to build realistic enterprise environments that frontier AI agents are trained and evaluated in. We're seeking experienced public-health professionals from major federal agencies (CDC, NIH, HHS), large state / county health departments, and top R1 schools of public health to recreate the digital workspaces they run every day and design the tasks that genuinely challenge state-of-the-art AI.

You'll bring your expertise in epidemiology, health policy, program management, or population health to build a high-fidelity environment that mirrors the tools, files, and cross-functional workflows of a major public-health organization — and then author tasks grounded in the programs you actually run today.

Key Responsibilities

• Build a realistic digital workspace centered on the Drive folders you use day-to-day — the surveillance summaries, grant applications, program evaluations, health-assessment reports, policy briefs, outbreak write-ups, and email threads that reflect how you actually organize your work — with some representation of the platforms that support it (e.g., Esri ArcGIS, SAS or MATLAB, Socrata open-data portals)

• Design multi-step tasks grounded in your real workflows that require navigating multiple apps, files, and stakeholders in a way that meaningfully challenges frontier AI agents

• Collaborate with other public-health experts in your field to design the environment, shape task scope, and review each other's scenarios for realism and rigor

• Work asynchronously with research teams to refine task designs and evaluation criteria for public-health agent benchmarks

• Contribute to frontier AI research and benchmarking — the work you produce directly informs how leading labs train and evaluate the next generation of AI systems

Ideal Qualifications

• 3+ years of full-time experience at a federal health agency, large state / county health department, major academic school of public health, or F500 population-health organization

• Background in one or more areas such as:

  • Epidemiology, surveillance, outbreak investigation

  • Health policy, health-services research, or program evaluation

  • Population / community health program management

  • Grants administration, cooperative agreements, or federal reporting

  • Environmental health or occupational health

• MPH / PhD / DrPH a plus; biostatistics or GIS fluency

• Day-to-day use of Esri ArcGIS / Google Maps Platform, SAS / MATLAB, and Socrata / Esri ArcGIS Hub

• Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate public-health workflows into structured task specs

Compensation Note

• Task Completion Pay: Competitive and based on task quality (~$1,150 – $1,450 per completed task, subject to change as the project evolves)

• Performance Bonus: Top performers receive a weekly bonus incentive on top of their per task rate!

• Hourly Opportunity: Top performers may be invited to transition to an hourly compensation model based on sustained quality and throughput.