**Role Overview**
Mercor is partnering with leading AI labs on **Project Atlas** — an initiative to build realistic enterprise environments that frontier AI agents are trained and evaluated in. We're seeking experienced public-health professionals from **major federal agencies (CDC, NIH, HHS), large state / county health departments, and top R1 schools of public health** to recreate the digital workspaces they run every day and design the tasks that genuinely challenge state-of-the-art AI.
You'll bring your expertise in epidemiology, health policy, program management, or population health to build a high-fidelity environment that mirrors the tools, files, and cross-functional workflows of a major public-health organization — and then author tasks grounded in the programs you actually run today.
• *Key Responsibilities**
- Build a realistic digital workspace centered on the Drive folders you use day-to-day — the surveillance summaries, grant applications, program evaluations, health-assessment reports, policy briefs, outbreak write-ups, and email threads that reflect how you actually organize your work — with some representation of the platforms that support it (e.g., Esri ArcGIS, SAS or MATLAB, Socrata open-data portals)
- Design multi-step tasks grounded in your real workflows that require navigating multiple apps, files, and stakeholders in a way that meaningfully challenges frontier AI agents
- Collaborate with other public-health experts in your field to design the environment, shape task scope, and review each other's scenarios for realism and rigor
- Work asynchronously with research teams to refine task designs and evaluation criteria for public-health agent benchmarks
- Contribute to frontier AI research and benchmarking — the work you produce directly informs how leading labs train and evaluate the next generation of AI systems
• *Ideal Qualifications**
- 3+ years of full-time experience at a **federal health agency, large state / county health department, major academic school of public health, or F500 population-health organization**
- Background in one or more areas such as:
- Epidemiology, surveillance, outbreak investigation
- Health policy, health-services research, or program evaluation
- Population / community health program management
- Grants administration, cooperative agreements, or federal reporting
- Environmental health or occupational health
- MPH / PhD / DrPH a plus; biostatistics or GIS fluency
- Day-to-day use of Esri ArcGIS / Google Maps Platform, SAS / MATLAB, and Socrata / Esri ArcGIS Hub
- Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate public-health workflows into structured task specs
• *Compensation Note**
- **Task Completion Pay:** Competitive and based on task quality (~$1,150 – $1,450 per completed task, subject to change as the project evolves)
- **Performance Bonus:** Top performers receive a weekly bonus incentive on top of their per task rate!
- **Hourly Opportunity:** Top performers may be invited to transition to an hourly compensation model based on sustained quality and throughput.