AI training roles for biologists, chemists and bioinformaticians

Life-science roles split by the evidence they ask for. You may need constructs you designed at the bench, pipelines you ran in code, or a degree plus lab years. One cluster also asks for hazard judgement. The sorting below uses the postings’ wording and the platforms’ pages, read 13 October 2026.

Find your evidence in one of three groups

There are 34 open roles here, from Mercor (15), SME Careers (6), Ethos (5), Sovrano AI (3), micro1 (3) and AfterQuery (2). The 5 Ethos roles are slide-deck work for medical science liaisons and a staff scientist, so the pay figures below leave them out.

Bench evidence

Mercor’s Molecular Biology roles want people who have designed primers, plasmids, guide RNAs, mRNA constructs and repair templates themselves. A PhD is strongly preferred. The US posting also asks for a strong record of peer-reviewed papers, weighted toward first-author work, and at least 20 weekday hours. It pays $70–105 an hour.

Mercor’s atomic layer deposition role wants hands-on process development and characterisation with tools such as XRD, SEM and TEM.

Code evidence

Mercor’s bioinformatics role asks for original questions with exact answers, plus a Jupyter notebook that reproduces each one.

AfterQuery’s bioinformatics and machine learning role is a project of two to three weeks, asynchronous, at 10 to 20 hours a week.

Degree plus lab years

SME Careers’ Biologist role asks for an MS or PhD from a top-100 university and a peer-reviewed publication. Its Biochemist role accepts a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience, with three years in research, lab work or teaching.

Sovrano’s biology, chemistry and life sciences roles accept a degree in progress and prefer two years of lab or biological data work. Mercor’s Biology, Chemistry and Biotechnology listings are standing pools that ask for a graduate degree or professional experience.

What the lab roles pay

The 23 hourly roles outside Ethos advertise a median ceiling of $90 an hour, an upper quartile of $110 and a top of $200. The site-wide median ceiling is $80.

Another 6 roles pay per task, and a task fee is not an hourly rate. Mercor’s chemistry red-team roles pay $65–75 per task.

Chemistry red-team roles test where a model should refuse

Mercor has 6 postings for the same job. You write prompts in three grades, benign, dual-use and adversarial, judge the model’s replies against a policy, and write the reference answer. The titles include forensic and toxicological chemist, chemical defence researcher and energetic materials expert.

Mercor’s postings say a model fails in both directions: it refuses routine questions and sometimes answers ones it should refuse. They ask for people who handled these questions in institutional settings, such as chemical defence research or hazardous device work.

You would be writing requests that sit close to the line. Your employer, especially in defence, government or pharma, may have a view on outside work on hazardous topics, and the postings do not mention it. And a Sovrano role in the academic list reviews biosafety and chemical safety answers.

Your lab’s data is not yours to submit

Of the 29 roles outside Ethos, 7 ask you to build tasks from your own work. Mercor’s biotechnology pool asks for a problem from a program you worked on. Its bioinformatics role lists your own unpublished lab data as a possible source, and calls private datasets you have the right to share a plus.

Check that right before you rely on it. Sequences, compounds, assay results and patient-derived data from your job often belong to your employer or funder. The postings do not discuss it.

The same bioinformatics posting names public archives such as GEO, SRA and PDB as a source. Public data or an invented case keeps the question out of your contract. None of the 29 descriptions mention intellectual property or employer approval.

The Mercor Molecular Biology postings say the work is W-2 employment through a staffing company acting as employer of record. Most roles here are contractor work, so check what that does to your day-job contract.

Hours the postings ask for

This site does not list roles that demand a minimum of 40 hours a week, so none appear here.

Where you can work from

Of the 29 roles outside Ethos, 5 are limited to the US by their location field or their own text. Sovrano’s biology posting lists five countries: the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia. Mercor posts separate US and UK Molecular Biology roles, so your jurisdiction decides which one you see.

See working from outside the US for how to read a country line.

Getting in

Most of the lab roles run through an AI interview. Mercor says its interview takes about 20 minutes, and our guide covers it. SME Careers uses a 15-minute video interview. Turing runs an application and assessments. AfterQuery asks for a short skills assessment in your domain, which it says cannot be retaken.

What the postings do not say

• Whether a pool leads to work. Of the 29 roles outside Ethos, 8 are standing pools or say no project is running.
• Whether seniority moves the rate. Mercor sets pay per project, and the pool listings show only past ranges.
• Hours after you are matched, and how long a project lasts.

This site is not affiliated with any platform named here, and passing a screening is not a promise of work.