What the work looks like

You'll spend most of your day doing two things: authoring Excel tasks drawn from work you have actually done, and grading model or peer solutions against them. A task might be a partially built three-statement model with a broken circularity toggle, a messy transaction dump that needs to be reshaped in Power Query before it can be pivoted, or an LBO where the returns bridge doesn't reconcile. You write the prompt, you write the gold-standard workbook, and you write the rationale explaining why one construction is correct and a plausible-looking alternative is not. When you evaluate, you're not just marking right or wrong — you're producing written feedback specific enough that a researcher who doesn't know finance can understand why a model's revenue build silently double-counted a segment.

What the screen actually measures

Mercor's screening probes whether your Excel depth is genuinely senior and whether it sits on top of real finance work. Expect follow-ups that push past tool names: not "do you know INDEX/MATCH" but when you'd choose it over XLOOKUP, when a dynamic array spills into trouble, how you'd structure a debt schedule to avoid a circular reference, what breaks in a Power Query refresh. Expect to describe deals, models, or analyses you personally built, with enough specificity that a finance-literate interviewer can follow the mechanics. Career progression matters — the listing asks for it explicitly — so be ready to explain your trajectory from analyst-level model maintenance to owning models end to end. Prior rubric-writing, annotation, or model-evaluation experience is a stated plus, not a gate.

Logistics

  • Remote, United States–based only. This is a hard requirement.
  • W-2 employment with Cincinnatus LLC as employer of record, placed with a leading technology client's extended workforce.
  • Availability is a real filter: 40 hours/week on weekdays through end of September, then 20 hours/week. This is not evenings-and-weekends work.
  • Observed pay band is $70–100/hr; rates vary by assessed depth and are never guaranteed.
  • Work is largely asynchronous task authoring and review, with collaboration across other SMEs to keep standards consistent.