C Systems Engineer: AI-Driven Codebase Reasoning (Remote)

Obsidian; New York (NY); On-site; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking experienced C engineers to build the dataset that teaches AI agents to reason about real codebases. You will select tasks from pre-validated C repositories and craft questions requiring runtime insight across complex systems.

You will work remotely in Mercor Studio, contributing to robust rubrics and documentation while earning $130 per approved task, with asynchronous collaboration across US, India, and Nigeria time zones.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience with substantial production C
• Ability to navigate large unfamiliar C codebases and reason about runtime behavior
• Experience with debuggers, sanitizers, tracing, and profilers
• Precise written English for crafting questions and rubrics

Responsibilities

• Select tasks from a pre-validated pool of C repositories, each pinned to a specific git commit, with an engineering question and rubrics
• Explore the repository until you understand the subsystem in question, including relevant PR or issue history
• Rewrite the task's question to defeat frontier coding agents while remaining well-defined and fairly answerable
• Adjust rubrics and foils to reward correct reasoning and reject plausible-but-wrong answers
• Run the full validation loop in Studio — Check, Golden, Run, Analyze — and iterate until every stage passes
• Document your work in the task README and submit for expert review, addressing reviewer feedback

Skills

C programming

Codebase navigation

Debugging tools

Technical writing

Tools

GDB

Valgrind

Perf/Tracing

Job description

Mercor is seeking experienced C engineers to build the dataset that teaches AI agents to reason about real codebases. You will select tasks from pre-validated C repositories and craft questions requiring runtime insight across complex systems.

You will work remotely in Mercor Studio, contributing to robust rubrics and documentation while earning $130 per approved task, with asynchronous collaboration across US, India, and Nigeria time zones.