Applied AI Software Engineer: Build for Frontier Research

Apply; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual performance bonus structure

Generous equity grant vested over 4 s

Up to $15k Relocation bonus

$10K proximity bonus (0.5 miles)

$1.5K monthly meals stipend

Free Equinox membership

$200 monthly laundry reimbursement

$200 monthly personal wellness reimbur

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Software Engineer on Applied AI to build, deploy, and operate systems that sit between frontier AI research and data delivery. You will own end-to-end projects, prototype with researchers, and deliver data creation pipelines that power production-grade solutions.

You’ll partner with frontier AI labs and Mercor’s teams to ship high-impact applied AI systems, balancing technical depth with customer-facing work in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust, etc.)
• Experience with model training and inference
• Strong grounding in statistical analysis and experimental design for measuring model performance and improvements
• Familiarity with evaluation methods for large language models
• Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively

Responsibilities

• Partner closely with frontier AI labs to understand their data, post-training, and evaluation needs
• Build and operate scalable data pipelines for post-training workflows and model evaluations
• Design and build scalable systems for synthetic data generation and data quality, and work directly with customers to understand requirements and develop technical solutions
• Prototype new data types, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks
• Lead technical discussions with customers

Skills

Python

Go

Rust

Model training

Inference

Statistics

Experiment design

Evaluation methods

Ambiguity handling

Job description

Mercor is seeking a Software Engineer on Applied AI to build, deploy, and operate systems that sit between frontier AI research and data delivery. You will own end-to-end projects, prototype with researchers, and deliver data creation pipelines that power production-grade solutions.

You’ll partner with frontier AI labs and Mercor’s teams to ship high-impact applied AI systems, balancing technical depth with customer-facing work in a fast-paced environment.