What the work actually involves

You write single-turn prompts in your own practice area and label each one benign, dual-use, or adversarial. Then you evaluate what the model returns against a stated policy standard and decide whether it handled the request correctly — including the failure mode that gets overlooked, where a model refuses a routine dose-rate or contamination-survey question that any RCT could answer from a handbook. For each item you also write the reference answer: what a correct response contains, and the technical reasoning behind it. Expect the prompt-writing to be the fast part and the rationale-writing to be most of the hours.

The dual-use tension is the whole point of the domain. Ir-192 underpins both brachytherapy and industrial radiography; a shielding calculation that keeps a worker under limits also describes what would hide a source from a portal monitor. The platform wants people who can feel the difference between a practitioner's question and a question fishing for something else, because that judgment comes from having done survey, assay, bioassay, or RWP work in a facility where being wrong had consequences.

What the screen looks for

  • Hands-on operational history — DOE site, national lab, reactor, accelerator, D&D characterisation, internal dosimetry — described with specific instruments, isotopes, and regulatory frameworks rather than job titles.
  • The ability to articulate why a given request is routine or suspicious, in prose a non-specialist reviewer can follow.
  • Writing evidence: technical reports, publications, expert witness work. Have a sample or link ready; the application asks for one.
  • Clean information hygiene. The work must not draw on classified or export-controlled material, NDA-covered content, or anything subject to prepublication review. Holding such obligations is not disqualifying if you disclose them — the platform scopes around it.

Logistics

Remote and asynchronous, paid per task in an observed $65–75 band (rates are set per project and not guaranteed). Throughput varies with batch availability; most contributors treat it as part-time alongside existing work. You will be reading and writing about misuse scenarios in radiological safety for sustained stretches — Mercor briefs experts on this beforehand and states you can pause or step away without penalty.