Senior HR Business Partner - Delivery

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

We’re looking for a Senior HR Business Partner to support Mercor’s Delivery organization.

Delivery sits at the center of how Mercor turns customer demand into high-quality human data. Teams are launching and scaling accounts quickly, managing changing customer requirements, developing operators into larger roles, and making constant decisions about talent, performance and organizational structure.

The HRBP supporting this organization needs to understand that environment.

You will work directly with Delivery leaders and managers on the people decisions that affect whether an account and the organization perform: who we put in critical roles, how we develop strong operators, where management is breaking down, how teams should be structured, when someone needs a larger challenge, and when performance is below the bar.

This is not a role for someone who wants to operate at a distance from the business. You should understand the work, the customer environment and the economics well enough to challenge leaders and make practical recommendations.

Experience in the human data / AI data industry is required. You should already understand the operating model behind businesses delivering human-generated data, expert data, model evaluations, RLHF, data annotation or similar services to AI customers.

What You’ll Do

• Partner directly with Delivery leadership. Advise leaders on talent, organization design, management, performance and workforce decisions as the organization scales.

• Get close to the accounts. Understand the differences between teams, customers and types of work so that your people recommendations reflect the actual business rather than a generic HR model.

• Raise the performance bar. Help managers distinguish exceptional performance from strong performance and performance that is below the bar. Make sure decisions are grounded in evidence and addressed quickly.

• Develop strong operators. Identify high-performing SPLs, account leaders and other critical talent early. Work with leaders to create meaningful next opportunities through larger accounts, expanded scope, new problems, internal mobility or management opportunities.

• Strengthen managers. Coach managers on feedback, expectations, team effectiveness, difficult conversations, performance issues and leadership behavior. Step in when a manager needs direct challenge, not simply support.

• Help us retain our best people. Identify retention risk before it becomes a resignation. Understand what is driving it, including scope, compensation, manager quality, account experience, career progression and external market pull, and work with leaders on the right intervention.

• Shape the organization as it changes. Partner on role clarity, organization design, succession, spans and layers, leadership changes and movement of talent between teams and accounts.

• Bring a people lens to staffing and workload. Identify when persistent workload, account design, insufficient capacity or operating friction is becoming a talent problem and work with Delivery leadership to address the root cause.

• Handle difficult people situations well. Support leaders through performance concerns, conduct issues, organizational changes, role changes and exits with speed, consistency and good judgment.

• Run talent and performance mechanisms for Delivery. Make the company-wide approach usable in a fast-moving operating organization without turning it into unnecessary process.

• See patterns before they become bigger problems. Use talent, performance, retention and employee signals to tell Delivery leadership what is changing and where intervention is needed.

• Build what does not exist yet. Mercor is still early. When the business needs a new mechanism, manager tool or talent practice, you should be comfortable building the first version yourself and improving it through use.

What We’re Looking For

• Human data industry experience is required. You have worked inside a company delivering human data or human expertise for AI systems, including areas such as AI training data, expert data, RLHF, model evaluation, data annotation or labeling, or closely related human data operations. You understand how these businesses actually run.

• 8+ years of strong HRBP experience. You have been the primary People partner to senior leaders and can independently handle complex organizational and talent decisions.

• Experience with operations or delivery organizations. You have supported teams where performance is closely tied to customers, quality, speed, capacity and execution.

• High-growth startup experience. You are comfortable with rapid organizational change, incomplete systems, ambiguous ownership and a business that can look meaningfully different six months from now.

• Strong business judgment. You can understand what is happening operationally, separate symptoms from root causes and make a clear recommendation.

• High performance orientation. You are comfortable differentiating performance, investing disproportionately in exceptional people and addressing weak performance directly.

• Excellent manager coach. You can make managers better and are comfortable challenging experienced leaders when their management approach is contributing to the problem.

• Strong talent instinct. You can recognize people with unusual trajectory, understand what may cause them to leave and help create opportunities that keep them growing.

• 0→1 builder. You have created useful talent, manager or organizational practices where little infrastructure existed before.

• Operator mindset. You do not stop at identifying the problem or writing the recommendation. You stay close enough to the work to make sure the solution actually works.

• Direct and low ego. You communicate clearly, handle disagreement well and care more about reaching the right answer than protecting your own idea.

• In-person. You are able to work from our San Francisco office five days a week.

Why Mercor

This role has unusual proximity to the core business.

You will work with the leaders responsible for delivering some of Mercor’s most important customer work while helping shape the talent systems behind an organization that is scaling extremely quickly.

You will have the opportunity to influence how we identify and develop exceptional operators, build stronger managers, structure Delivery teams, retain critical talent and raise the performance bar across the organization.

For someone who already understands the human data industry, this is an opportunity to help build the People infrastructure for one of the companies defining its next stage.

Benefits:

• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years

• Health, dental, and vision insurance

• 401(k) with company match

• Unlimited paid vacation and sick days

• Parental leave for birthing and non-birthing parents

• Free mental health services

• $200 monthly wellness reimbursement

• $1.5K monthly meal stipend

• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement

• Free Equinox membership

• Up to $15K relocation bonus

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.