Software Engineer, Robotics Data

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bi-annual bonus

Equity grant

Relocation bonus

Housing stipend

Meals stipend

Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Health insurance

Job summary

Mercor in San Francisco seeks a senior data engineer to build the data backbone for physical AI, ingesting and processing multi-sensor data at petabyte scale to deliver validated, privacy-safe datasets for frontier labs. You’ll implement segmentation, pre-labeling, QC, and packaging across thousands of concurrent collectors.

You will own end-to-end pipelines, apply privacy and quality controls, and collaborate with researchers and operators to shape data standards and workflows in a fast-moving,

Qualifications

• High-volume data pipelines ownership and development.
• Experience processing video or sensor data at scale.
• Fluency in Python and AWS experience.
• Ability to work in ambiguous, fast-moving spaces.

Responsibilities

• Build end-to-end sensor data pipelines from capture to delivery.
• Design automated QC and dataset schemas.
• Integrate VLM-assisted labeling and QC into workflows.
• Ensure privacy, security and traceability of data.

Skills

Production backend

Video/sensor data processing

Python

AWS

Ambiguity handling

Tools

MCAP

ROS bags

protobuf

Foxglove

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

Frontier AI is going physical, and the labs building it are bottlenecked on one thing: high-quality data from the real world. Mercor pairs its operational scale with the specialized engineering that physical-world data demands.

You'll build the data backbone of physical AI: the pipelines that take raw multi-sensor capture from the field (video, depth, inertial, audio, and more) and turn it into validated, privacy-safe, delivery-ready datasets for frontier labs. Ingest, segmentation, pre-labeling, automated QC, and packaging, at petabyte scale across thousands of concurrent collectors.

What You'll Do

• Build the end-to-end sensor data pipeline: ingest from capture devices in the field, through segmentation, pre-labeling, QC, and packaged delivery to customers

• Design automated QC that validates recordings at scale: timing and sync integrity, calibration health, sensor continuity, coverage against requirements

• Establish dataset schemas, versioning, provenance, and versioning, so every delivery has a clear system traceability

• Build shared processing components such as privacy redaction, transcription, encoding, format packaging across all offerings

• Integrate VLM-assisted pre-labeling and quality scoring into production workflows without sacrificing debuggability or human oversight

What Makes This Role Different

• High ownership, early. This is a young, strategically central product area; the product you build will shape Mercor's physical-world data collection standards

• The data is the deliverable. The end product at Mercor is the data; what your pipeline produces is what shapes the models that large frontier lab trains on

• Real physical-world scale. Your inputs come from devices operated by humans in global real world settings, for thousands of hours. Building systems that scale is precedent.

What We're Looking For

• Strong production backend/data engineering experience - you've built and owned high-volume data pipelines

• Experience processing video or sensor data at scale: large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, object storage economics

• Fluency in Python and comfortable with AWS

• Genuine data taste: you can look at a sensor trace or a timing histogram and tell when something is off

• Comfort in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where requirements evolve with the customer

Nice to Have

• Experience with robotics data formats and tooling (MCAP, ROS bags, protobuf, Foxglove), camera geometry, or multi-sensor calibration and synchronization

• Computer vision or multimodal ML experience (detection, tracking, VLM-based labeling or QC)

• Prior work on data engines for AV, robotics, or egocentric video

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