Go Engineer - Codebase Expert

Obsidian; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor is seeking experienced Go engineers to build datasets that teach AI agents to reason about real codebases. You will tackle production Go repositories and craft tasks that require runtime evidence to answer.

Work is fully remote and asynchronous with teams across US, India, and Nigeria. You will document findings, adjust rubrics, and contribute to a scalable task validation workflow. The role emphasizes deep code understanding, architecture awareness, and precise written questions.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of production Go experience
• Ability to explore large unfamiliar Go codebases and reason about runtime behavior
• Fluent in Go concurrency, interfaces, and standard library
• Experience with distributed systems or Kubernetes tooling

Responsibilities

• Select tasks from a pre-validated pool of Go repositories
• Explore repositories to understand subsystems and history
• Rewrite task questions to challenge frontier agents
• Tune rubrics and foils to reward correct reasoning
• Run full validation loop and iterate until successful
• Document work in a task README and address reviewer feedback

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Kubernetes tooling

Code navigation

Concurrency

Tools

Git

Containers

CI/CD

Job description

1. Role Overview

Mercor is seeking experienced Go engineers to build the dataset that teaches AI agents to reason about real codebases.

Codebase Q&A is a reinforcement-learning environment for training AI agents to explore and reason about software repositories they have never seen before. You will build difficult codebase-exploration tasks: high-level engineering questions about production Go repositories that cannot be answered by reading a single file, and that require runtime evidence to resolve — the kind of question a senior engineer answers by actually investigating the system.

This track works on infrastructure-grade Go codebases including etcd, Traefik, Helm, Kustomize, CoreDNS, NATS Server, Temporal, Syncthing, restic, Authelia, BadgerDB, quic-go, gRPC-Go, Hugo, rclone, Trivy, cert-manager and Pion WebRTC.

Contract, task-based work paid at $130 per approved task, performed remotely in Mercor Studio.

2. Key Responsibilities

• Select tasks from a pre-validated pool of Go repositories, each pinned to a specific git commit and arriving with an engineering question, positive and negative rubrics, foils, and a golden solution

• Explore the repository until you genuinely understand the subsystem in question, including the relevant PR or issue history

• Rewrite the task's question so it defeats frontier coding agents while remaining well-defined and fairly answerable

• Adjust rubrics and foils so they 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 on returned tasks

3. Ideal Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial production Go

• Demonstrated ability to navigate a large, unfamiliar Go codebase and explain how it behaves at runtime — not just what the source says

• Fluency in Go concurrency, interfaces, module boundaries, and the standard library; comfort reading generated code and build tooling

• Experience with distributed systems, networking, storage engines, or Kubernetes-ecosystem tooling is highly relevant — the task mix is weighted toward architecture and system design (42%), code onboarding (26%) and root-cause analysis (20%)

• Precise written English: the questions and rubrics you write are the product

• Comfortable with git at commit level, containerized environments, and command-line tooling

4. Working Details

• Fully remote and asynchronous, with expert team leads across US, India, and Nigeria time zones

• Work is performed in Mercor Studio; time is tracked with Insightful, and platform access is provisioned through Okta

• Onboarding requires identity verification, a background check, signed Terms of Work and CIIAA, a tax form, and passing a short calibration quiz before task access is granted

• Payment is per approved task; every task is reviewed by a second engineer and a super reviewer before acceptance