Research Operations & Administration 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 research-operations and research-administration professionals from top R1 universities, major academic medical centers, NIH / federal research agencies, and large nonprofit research organizations 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 pre- / post-award grants management, research compliance, sponsored-programs administration, or core-facility operations to build a high-fidelity environment that mirrors the tools, files, and cross-functional workflows of a serious research enterprise — 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 grant proposals, budgets and budget justifications, IRB / IACUC protocols, post-award financial reports, effort certifications, compliance training records, and email threads that reflect how you actually organize your work — with some representation of the platforms that support it (e.g., SharePoint / Box, DocuSign, ADP Workforce Now)

• 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 research-operations and administration 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 research-administration 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 top R1 university, academic medical center, federal research agency, or large research nonprofit

• Background in one or more areas such as:

  • Pre-award grants management (NIH, NSF, DOE, DoD, foundation grants)

  • Post-award financial / compliance management (Uniform Guidance, 2 CFR 200, FFR / RPPR)

  • Sponsored-programs administration or contract negotiation

  • Research compliance (IRB, IACUC, IBC, COI, export control)

  • Core-facility / shared-resource operations

• Certifications a plus: CRA, CPRA, CFRA

• Day-to-day use of SharePoint / Box, DocuSign, Mendeley / EndNote, and ADP Workforce Now / UKG Pro

• Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate research-admin 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.