SWE

Mercor is hiring experienced Software Engineers specialized in Cybersecurity to support high-impact research collaborations with leading AI labs. Freelancers will contribute to building training datasets that improve AI model reasoning and problem-solving on real-world coding tasks.

This is a unique opportunity to apply your software engineering expertise toward shaping the next generation of intelligent systems.

About the Project

Youll annotate frontier-model trajectories on SWE-benchstyle tasks derived from real open-source repositories. Currently closed-source models do not expose their internal reasoning traces making it difficult to understand how LLMs approach problem-solving.

To address this gap youll reconstruct and annotate the reasoning portions of model trajectoriesusing your own problem-solving process and the full task context to infer and infill the underlying thought process at each step.

Key Responsibilities

• Design benchmark tasks by ideating a vulnerability class (type/subtype difficulty) and validating the intended exploit behavior

• Create or validate small runnable codebases (environment/ repos) that include ingestion plus prompt/tool usage where the trust boundary is violated

• Validate the attack via an exploit script and document the unsafe behavior clearly

• Validate implementation of a patch that prevents the exploit and verify the fix is effective

• Produce task metadata (e.g. severity mapping exact file/line locations impact analysis remediation summary references)

• Conduct review QC to ensure paths resolve line ranges are correct labels arent leaked and the fix blocks the exploit

Ideal Qualifications

• 2 years of experience in software engineering with a focus on application security vulnerability research or secure software engineering

• Degree in Software Engineering Computer Science or a related field (Bachelors minimum; advanced degree preferred)

• Strong proficiency in Python JavaScript TypeScript or other common languages found in open-source projects

• Familiarity with version control workflows (Git PRs issue tracking)

• Comfortable articulating technical reasoning in clear structured writing

Project Timeline

• Start Date: Immediate

• Duration: 12 months

• Commitment: Part-time (1525 hours/week with flexibility up to 40 hours/week)

Application & Onboarding Process

• Upload your resume

• AI interview: A short 15-minute conversational session to understand your background experience and interest in the role

• Follow-up communication within a few days with next steps and onboarding details

Apply today and leverage your software engineering expertise to help build the future of AI-driven systems!