What the work involves

You are producing training data for multi-modal design reasoning, not producing client deliverables. Day to day that means authoring prompts that mirror real design briefs — a logo system that has to survive one-colour print, a dashboard card that needs a clear type hierarchy at 13px, a landing hero with a specific brand voice — and then writing or grading model responses against them. A large share of the job is review: reading a model's output, deciding whether its critique of a layout is actually correct, and writing the rationale that explains why the kerning, contrast ratio, or grid decision fails. Your written justification is often more valuable to the model than your verdict.

Mercor is explicit that this is a visual design role, not a UX role. They want people who make things that look resolved — brand and marketing assets, websites, apps — with a point of view about aesthetics. Research plans, journey maps, and usability audits are not what this listing is screening for, and applicants who lead with them tend to get filtered.

What the platform screens for

  • An AI-led interview covering creative workflow, planning, and systemic design thinking — expect follow-ups that push past your first answer.
  • A ~25-minute screen-shared walkthrough of one piece of your own work. You must apply from a desktop or laptop with browser screen-share permissions already enabled; a phone application cannot proceed.
  • A portfolio review after the interview. Selection weighs interview performance and portfolio quality roughly together, so a strong reel with a vague walkthrough does not clear.

The walkthrough is the real test. Screeners are looking for whether you can articulate decisions — why this typeface, why this spacing scale, what you rejected — because that articulation is the exact skill the annotation work requires.

Logistics

Fully remote and largely asynchronous, with a flexible 10–20 hours per week and stated potential to scale toward 40. Applicants must be based in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, or New Zealand. The listing names an early-to-mid-August start with rolling review, so timelines shift with cohort demand. Pay in the $50–80/hr range is what has been observed on comparable Mercor creative pods, not a guarantee.