Strategic Projects Lead, Deeptune

Mercor

New York (NY)

On-site

USD 120,000 - 150,000

Full time

14 days+

Application generator

Don’t send a generic resume — generate a resume and cover letter tailored to this exact role.

Get past ATS filters

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation bonus

Housing bonus near office

Meals stipend

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Job summary

Mercor seeks a Strategic Projects Lead to own and scale the data operations powering frontier AI training. This high-ownership role requires strong agency, decisive judgment, and the ability to build processes that hold up under pressure.

As SPL, you will manage a distributed team, forecast timelines, meet throughput targets, and maintain a high bar for everything that ships. Your work will shape frontier models and how they're deployed, in-person five days a week at One World Trade.

Qualifications

2+ years of experience in consulting, finance, startups, or other operationally intense environments.
Strong analytical and communication abilities; proven track record of managing complex projects.
Customer-facing experience with high-profile clients.
Gritty process optimization and large-scale execution mindset.

Responsibilities

Own delivery end-to-end: responsible for data delivery, deadlines, throughput, and quality.
Solve ambiguous problems by building scalable solutions for the org.
Build and lead contributor teams: recruit, train, and manage a distributed workforce.
Partner cross-functionally: collaborate with engineers to scope requirements and ship improvements.
Drive continuous improvement: identify bottlenecks and implement effective fixes.

Skills

Analytical thinking

Communication skills

Project management

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 Deeptune

Deeptune is an RL environments lab within Mercor that builds training gyms for AI agents: high-fidelity simulations where AI learns to perform real-world tasks through reinforcement learning. We work with the leading AI labs to help them train the next generation of agentic models, and our environments have already contributed to recent breakthroughs in computer use, code generation, and multi-step task completion.

About the Role

We're looking for a Strategic Projects Lead to own and scale the data operations that power frontier AI training. This is a high-ownership role for someone with strong agency, comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, and capable of building processes that hold up under pressure.

As an SPL, you will own projects end-to-end, from scoping through final delivery. You'll be responsible for managing a distributed team, forecasting timelines, meeting throughput targets, and maintaining a high bar for everything that ships. You'll face ambiguous problems and are expected to solve them in ways that scale across the org. Your work will directly shape frontier models and how they're deployed.

What You'll Do

Own delivery end-to-end: You're accountable for data delivery end-to-end, including deadlines, throughput, and quality

Solve ambiguous problems: When you find a broken or inefficient process, you will build a scalable solution that the whole org will benefit from

Build and lead contributor teams: Recruit, train, and manage a distributed workforce; turn new hires into high performers.

Partner cross-functionally: Work closely with our engineers to scope technical requirements, flag blockers, and ship improvements to our pipeline infrastructure

Drive continuous improvement: Identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and quality gaps, and then build the solution.s

SPLs are obsessed with both quality and velocity. You'll combine analytical rigor, quantitative thinking, strong judgment, and creative problem-solving to move data efficiently through complex systems – often with imperfect information.

What We're Looking For

2+ Years of experience: Background in consulting, finance, startups, or other operationally intense environments.

Skills: Strong analytical and communication abilities; proven track record of managing complex projects.

Customer-Facing Experience: Comfortable working directly with high-profile clients.

Mindset: Excited by "gritty" process optimization and large-scale execution.

About You

You're a self-directed operator who takes ownership without being asked.

You'd rather build a system than do the same task twice.

You're motivated by the chance to shape how frontier AI gets built.

You are motivated by ownership, impact, and building frontier tech.

Your work is a craft you want to master.

You thrive in ambiguity and love hard problems.

You appreciate diverse perspectives and uncommon ideas.

You are excited about building in-person, 5 days a week, from our office at One World Trade.

Key Facts

SPLs generate $10M+ in project revenue annually.

Customer requests are high-pressure and time-sensitive (e.g., onboarding 1,000 contributors in 3 days, delivering 10+ hours of quality data per contributor within 48 hours).