Research Engineer – Benchmarking

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual bonus

Equity grant

Relocation bonus

Housing allowance

Meals stipend

Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Healthcare

Job summary

Mercor in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer to join the intersection of engineering and applied AI research. You’ll own benchmarking pipelines, evaluation systems, and failure analysis workflows that inform training and improvement of frontier language models.

You’ll design and run evals, build rubrics and scorers, and collaborate with researchers, operators, and data teams to ensure data quality and scalable benchmarks in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Strong applied research background in model evaluation, benchmarking, and failure analysis.
• Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with ML models and evaluation code.
• Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and backend systems.
• Comfort with APIs, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud platforms for running and storing eval results.
• Ability to reason about model behavior, experimental results, and data quality from evals and failure analyses.

Responsibilities

• Benchmarking: Design, implement, and maintain benchmarks and metrics for tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning; ensure benchmarks scale with training and stay aligned with product and research goals.
• Evaluation systems: Build and operate LLM evaluation systems end-to-end runs, scoring, dashboards, and reporting, so researchers and applied AI teams can track model performance and compare runs at scale.
• Failure analysis: Run systematic failure analysis on model outputs (e.g., wrong tool use, reasoning errors, safety/alignment issues); categorize failure modes, quantify prevalence, and feed findings into reward design, data curation, and benchmark design.
• Rubrics and evaluators: Create and refine rubrics, automated evaluators, and scoring frameworks that drive training and evaluation decisions; balance rigor with scalability (human vs. model-as-judge, calibration, agreement).
• Data quality and usability: Quantify data usability, quality, and impact on key benchmarks; use evals and failure analysis to guide data generation, augmentation, and curation.
• Cross-team collaboration: Work with AI researchers, applied AI teams, and data producers to align evals with training objectives and to prioritize benchmarks and failure analyses that matter most.
• Ownership in a fast-paced environment: Operate in a high-iteration research setting with strong ownership of benchmarks, evals, and failure-analysis workflows.

Job description

About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents. Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

About the Role

As a Research Engineer at Mercor, you’ll work at the intersection of engineering and applied AI research. You’ll own benchmarking pipelines, evaluation systems, and failure analysis workflows that directly inform how we train and improve frontier language models. Your work will define how we measure tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning. You’ll design and run evals, build rubrics and scorers, and turn failure analysis into actionable improvements for post-training, RLVR, and data pipelines.

What You’ll Do

• Benchmarking: Design, implement, and maintain benchmarks and metrics for tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning; ensure benchmarks scale with training and stay aligned with product and research goals.
• Evaluation systems: Build and operate LLM evaluation systems end-to-end runs, scoring, dashboards, and reporting, so researchers and applied AI teams can track model performance and compare runs at scale.
• Failure analysis: Run systematic failure analysis on model outputs (e.g., wrong tool use, reasoning errors, safety/alignment issues); categorize failure modes, quantify prevalence, and feed findings into reward design, data curation, and benchmark design.
• Rubrics and evaluators: Create and refine rubrics, automated evaluators, and scoring frameworks that drive training and evaluation decisions; balance rigor with scalability (human vs. model-as-judge, calibration, agreement).
• Data quality and usability: Quantify data usability, quality, and impact on key benchmarks; use evals and failure analysis to guide data generation, augmentation, and curation.
• Cross-team collaboration: Work with AI researchers, applied AI teams, and data producers to align evals with training objectives and to prioritize benchmarks and failure analyses that matter most.
• Ownership in a fast-paced environment: Operate in a high-iteration research setting with strong ownership of benchmarks, evals, and failure-analysis workflows.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong applied research background, with focus on model evaluation, benchmarking, and/or failure analysis.
• Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with ML models and evaluation code.
• Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and backend systems.
• Comfort with APIs, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud platforms for running and storing eval results.
• Ability to reason about model behavior, experimental results, and data quality from evals and failure analyses.
• Excitement to work in person in San Francisco five days a week in a high-intensity, high-ownership environment.

Nice To Have

• Industry experience on a post-training or evaluation/benchmarking team (highest priority).
• Publications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL), especially in evaluation or benchmarking.
• Experience building or running LLM evaluations, benchmarks, or failure-analysis pipelines.
• Experience with synthetic data generation, rubric design, or RL-style workflows that use evals for reward shaping.
• Work samples or code (e.g., eval frameworks, benchmark suites, failure-analysis reports or tooling) that demonstrate relevant skills.

Benefits

• Bi-annual performance bonus structure
• Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
• Up to $15k Relocation bonus
• $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
• $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
• Free Equinox membership
• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance