Research Engineer, Intern – Benchmarking

Mercor

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 160,000 - 230,000

Full time

4 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Meal stipend

Relocation support

Housing support

Free Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Research Engineer in San Francisco to own benchmarking pipelines, evaluation systems, and failure-analysis workflows that directly inform how frontier language models are trained and improved.

You will design and run evals, build rubrics and scorers, and collaborate with researchers and data teams to drive model performance. This is an in-person role five days a week in San Francisco.

Qualifications

Strong applied research background in model evaluation or benchmarking.
Hands-on coding skills and experience with ML models and evaluation code.
Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and backend systems.

Responsibilities

Benchmarking: design and maintain benchmarks and metrics for tool use and real-world reasoning.
Evaluation systems: build end-to-end evaluation runs, scoring, dashboards, and reporting.
Failure analysis: run systematic analysis on model outputs and feed findings into improvements.
Rubrics and evaluators: create rubrics and scoring frameworks for training decisions.
Data quality and usability: quantify data usability and impact on benchmarks.
Cross-team collaboration: work with researchers and data producers to align evals with objectives.
Ownership in a fast-paced environment: take ownership of benchmarks, evals, and workflows.

Skills

Applied research

Model evaluation

Benchmarking

Python

ML models

Backend systems

APIs

SQL/NoSQL

Cloud platforms

Data analysis

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