Nuclear Security Engineer

About this role

## About the work Mercor is assembling a panel of nuclear materials and safeguards experts to red-team frontier AI models. The goal is to test whether a model can correctly judge the misuse potential of a technical request — answering legitimate questions fully while refusing genuinely dangerous ones. You will: - Write challenging single-turn prompts in your domain, labelled across three levels: benign, dual-use, and adversarial. - Evaluate the responses that come back against a defined policy standard, and judge whether each was handled correctly. - Write the reference answer — what a correct response looks like, and the technical reasoning for why. This domain lives on the dual-use line more than most. The same material-balance calculation that closes an inspector's account can be used to hide what is missing from it; the same protection assessment that hardens a facility maps its weaknesses. A model that refuses a routine material-accounting question is failing as badly as one that answers a question it shouldn't. Drawing that line reliably is why we need practitioners rather than generalists. ## Background we're looking for We're looking for people who have been responsible for keeping nuclear material where it belongs — material control and accountability, physical protection, and the assessments that test both. What matters most is being able to tell a routine professional question from one that's fishing for something else: the same vulnerability assessment that closes a gap also describes it. You will be writing prompts that sit exactly on that line, then judging whether the model held it. Examples of relevant backgrounds (ideally with red-teaming experience): - Material control and accountability (MC&A) programme design, operation or assessment at a national laboratory or licensee - Physical protection system engineering — sensors, barriers, delay, response force, performance testing - Vulnerability assessment and adversary path analysis for nuclear