Deadline: September 26, 2026
Applications are open for the Mercor Research Fellowship 2026. The Mercor Research Fellowship funds people to build the next generation of benchmarks, evaluation techniques, and economic analyses of AI. You can pitch a benchmark or eval methodology you want to build — a new domain, a harder task format, a better way to measure agentic reliability — and if selected, you get the time, compute, expert labor, and mentorship to design, implement, and release it end to end. Or, on the economics side, you can pitch a study using Mercor’s proprietary data to better understand an aspect of AI’s impact on the economy and firms.
You’ll work directly with the APEX research team, get access to real enterprise evaluation problems from Mercor’s Fortune 500 and frontier-lab partners, and see your work shape how the industry measures AI capability.
Focus Areas
- Long-horizon, multi-app agentic tasks in professional services (law, finance, consulting) — extending APEX-Agents
- Real-world software engineering evaluation beyond issue resolution — extending APEX-SWE
- Professional accounting and finance workflows — extending APEX-Accounting
- AI-for-Science evals: research-level mathematics, biology, materials science, and theoretical physics
- New economic benchmarks — negotiation, management, and other capabilities that carry economic value but resist standard task formats
- Novel evaluation methodology: contamination resistance, rubric design, human-vs-model grading agreement, cost-adjusted scoring
- The economics of human data platforms like Mercor – pricing, matching, elasticity of supply and demand.
- AI Theory of the Firm: what an AI-native firm looks like from the inside, and how work is actually organized within one, with a focus on empirical work.
- Strong pitches outside this list are welcome — we fund the best ideas, not the closest fit to a template.
Benefits
- 3-month stipend of $40,000 or 6-month stipend of $80,000
- Unlimited API credits, plus a dedicated budget for GPU compute and paid expert/human-data time
- Weekly 1:1 mentorship with a member of the APEX research team, plus regular access to the broader research org
- Access to Mercor’s marketplace and expert-network data for empirical work, subject to review
- Access to frontier model APIs, Mercor’s internal evaluation infrastructure, and — where appropriate — real enterprise evaluation problems from Mercor’s customers
- Optional desk in Mercor’s San Francisco office for fellows who want to be in person
- Introductions to Mercor’s network of researchers across frontier labs and academia
- Standout fellows are considered for a full-time offer on the APEX research team at the end of the fellowship
Eligibility
- They seek genuine interest in evaluation as a research discipline — not just a stepping stone to a model-building role.
- Background in economics, CS, ML, statistics, or an adjacent field (measurement, psychometrics, HCI, social science)
- A specific, well-scoped idea for a benchmark, eval technique, or empirical study you want to build — the fellowship is built around your pitch.
- Comfortable in a startup environment: fast iteration, direct access to real customer problems, less hand-holding than an academic lab.
- Able to commit at least 30 hours/week for the duration of the fellowship — during a leave, over a summer, or a flexible stretch of a PhD.
- Bonus: experience with agentic evaluation, RL environments, or domain expertise in law, finance, medicine, or a scientific field.
Application
The application deadline is September 26, 2026 at 7:00 AM GMT+1.
For more information, visit Mercor Research Fellowship.
