Mercor
Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data
San Francisco · Senior
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 64 days ago
Distributed SystemsAlgorithmsElasticsearchAPI DevelopmentRESTNLPLLMsRAGA/B TestingLeadershipCommunicationMentoringWriting
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Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70
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About the role
- Some of the most valuable work on Mercor's platform is code-the tasks, problems, and solutions that train and evaluate the world's frontier coding models.
- Searching over code is a genuinely hard problem.
- Identifying similar code tasks-not just similar text-requires retrieval that understands structure, semantics, intent, and difficulty, far beyond what generic embeddings capture.
Responsibilities
- Build the system that identifies and selects the correct code-specific models for a given task, and routes tasks to the right model.
- Design natural-language-to-query translation that turns NLP questions into precise search over code and tasks.
- Design and operate the indexing pipeline so the task index stays fresh and consistent as new tasks, solutions, and results arrive continuously-balancing incremental updates, full rebuilds, and real-time ingestion.
- Build the systems and evaluation harnesses that let us continuously evolve embeddings, models, and search quality-safely swapping in new code models, re-embedding corpora, and A/B testing relevance as SOTA advances.
- Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for code retrieval across the organization, and lead the highest-stakes design reviews.
- Mentor and grow engineers-junior and senior-through design reviews, pairing, and clear technical writing, raising the technical bar across the org.
- Partner with product, researchers, and engineering leadership on build-vs-buy decisions, platform investments, and technical hiring.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Senior level or above, with a Staff-level track record of org-wide technical impact.
- A track record of making the right cost-vs-speed tradeoffs: latency budgets, throughput, memory footprint, and infrastructure spend on high-QPS systems.
- Familiarity translating natural-language questions into structured search queries (query understanding, semantic parsing, or LLM-assisted query generation).
Nice to have
- Experience training or fine-tuning code embedding models or code-specific LLMs.
- Familiarity with LLM-based retrieval, RAG patterns, and model routing/selection.
- Background operating latency-critical services on modern cloud and orchestration infrastructure.
- Ownership: Org-wide technical scope with a direct line to engineering leadership and real authority over technical direction.
- Growth: Shape the engineering organization itself-its standards, its architecture, and its next generation of technical leaders.
Benefits
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15K relocation bonus (if moving to the Bay Area)
- A $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
- A $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Health insurance
Company info
- Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy.
- We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.
- Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models.
- Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work.
- Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies:
- helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
- Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement.
- Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team.
- You'll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society.
- Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion.
- We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
Equal opportunity
- equal opportunity employer.
This listing is sourced directly from Mercor's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.