What the work actually is
You write Excel tasks a working professional would plausibly be handed — a three-statement model that needs a circularity fix, a messy export that needs Power Query normalization, a dashboard that has to survive a new region being added — and then you write the correct solution, cell by cell, with reasoning a reviewer can audit. The second half of the job is evaluation: reading a model's attempt (or another expert's) and writing feedback that names the specific formula, assumption, or structural choice that went wrong and why it matters. Expect to defend your grading when another SME disagrees, and to help research teams identify which categories of spreadsheet reasoning the model is still failing.
What the platform screens for
Mercor's screen is AI-led and pushes on depth. Vague claims about being "advanced in Excel" collapse quickly under follow-up; what survives is your ability to name the function, the failure mode, and the alternative you chose instead. Because this posting explicitly wants generalists, the screen probes range: modeling in one industry, operational reporting in another, automation somewhere else. Teaching or training background and a PhD are called out as pluses, as is prior rubric-based annotation work on Mercor or a comparable platform. Career progression matters — they want to see the trajectory, not just a list of tools.
Logistics
- Employment: W-2 through Cincinnatus LLC as employer of record, with placement into a leading technology company's extended workforce.
- Location: United States only.
- Hours: 40/week on weekdays through end of September, then 20/week. This is a real commitment, not a nights-and-weekends gig, and the screen will test whether you can hold it.
- Pay: $70–100/hr observed for this band; not guaranteed, and rates vary with experience and project.
Work is largely asynchronous inside the platform's task tooling, with SME coordination threads for consistency calls. Sustained daytime availability is the operative constraint.