Remote Search Optimization Engineer: Scale & Relevance

Mercor; Toronto; Remote; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor in Toronto is seeking engineers who have shipped production search systems and are thinking hard about the requirements and optimizations of those systems. You should bring war stories—messy, specific experiences about relevance, retrieval, and the tradeoffs you've made in real systems.

This interview is 25 minutes, conversational with no coding or take-home assignments. We want to hear how you actually think about search quality, evaluation, and the impact of your decisions on real users.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping production search systems with measurable user impact.
• Strong background in relevance and retrieval algorithm design.
• Proven ability to scale data infrastructure for modern search workloads.
• Experience with agentic or autonomous search concepts is a plus.
• Ability to quantify improvements and tradeoffs with real-world data.

Responsibilities

• Discuss how you design and evaluate search quality in real systems.
• Explain tradeoffs between latency, precision, and coverage using war stories.
• Share concrete examples of impact and improvements in production search.

Skills

Shipped production search systems

Agentic search

Relevance / retrieval systems

Data infrastructure for search

Evaluation & metrics for search

Job description

Mercor in Toronto is seeking engineers who have shipped production search systems and are thinking hard about the requirements and optimizations of those systems. You should bring war stories—messy, specific experiences about relevance, retrieval, and the tradeoffs you've made in real systems.

This interview is 25 minutes, conversational with no coding or take-home assignments. We want to hear how you actually think about search quality, evaluation, and the impact of your decisions on real users.