Research Engineer - Real Environments

About Mercor

Mercor’s mission is to organize human intelligence for the AI economy. We build the infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. More than five million experts have joined our network, and we pay out over $5 million daily for their knowledge and expertise.

We built our training and evaluation infrastructure alongside the world’s leading AI labs. Now, we’re bringing those capabilities to enterprises across industries, enabling them to train, evaluate, and improve AI using their own expertise and standards. Our APEX benchmarks measure how AI performs on economically valuable work, while our enterprise evaluations and post-training capabilities turn those insights into measurable improvements across real-world workflows.

Our work sits at the intersection of frontier AI, human expertise, and real-world application. We’re solving problems few companies have encountered, with the opportunity to influence what the world’s most advanced AI systems become capable of doing. We’re looking for people who bring different perspectives, take ownership, exercise sound judgment, and hold themselves to an exceptionally high standard. You’ll have the opportunity to do consequential work alongside talented colleagues who challenge one another, collaborate openly, and share a commitment to excellence.

Mercor is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation. We work in person five days a week in San Francisco, New York, and London.

About the Role

You’ll work with large enterprises to capture their data and transform it into high-fidelity RL environments for capability evaluations and training datasets for frontier labs. We focus on pushing the frontier of world-building, verifier engineering, and more alongside our partners.

Your goal will be to automate the process of building evals for real work in the economy.

What You'll Do

• Ship models for workflow extraction, classification, and grading.

• Engineer autonomous task refinement processes which distill data taste into pipelines.

• Deliver data to customers and deploy into real engagements.

• Help define the future of agentic transformation for enterprises around the world.

• Deeply learn about the intricacies of enterprises through building evaluations for all aspects of work.

• Build end-to-end environments for labs & enterprises by platformizing sandbox app clones, load real data into the sandboxes, build prompts from real workflows, and write verifiers leveraging enterprise expertise & golden outputs.

• Systematize the production of environments to scale throughput while maintaining high-quality worlds and verifiers.

What We're Looking For

• Prior experience shipping environments – you’ve contributed to an OSS framework, built environments at previous companies, or worked on agentic evaluations.

• Strong full-stack engineering skills – you’ll be responsible for everything from infrastructure to app code to analytics

• Bias to action – this team is focused on shipping evals, not just philosophizing about them.

• Curiosity – being biased towards understanding and digging deep into model behavior and actually looking at the data.

• Sweat the details that make a simulation indistinguishable from the real thing and have systems-level thinking skills that allow you to scale up quality.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Temporal, Modal, or similar orchestration/compute services

• Experience with synthetic data generation for frontier models.Past work auditing and scrutinizing industry-standard evaluations

Benefits

• Semi-annual performance bonus structure

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years

• Up to $15k Relocation bonus

• $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)

• $1.5K monthly stipend for meals

• Free Equinox membership

• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement

• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement

• Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Mercor is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to providing equal opportunity to all employees and applicants. Mercor does not discriminate based on actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, related medical conditions and lactation), gender identity or gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, disability, protected medical condition as defined by California or local law, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, California, or local laws and ordinances. Further, Mercor prohibits discrimination, harassment, and retaliation based on any combination of protected characteristics. This Policy applies to all areas of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, compensation, benefits, discipline, termination, and all other privileges, terms, and conditions of employment. This Policy and the law prohibit employment discrimination against any employee or applicant based on any legally protected status.