Applied Machine Learning Engineer, Economist
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 2mo ago
About the job
Mercor is a leading AI data company that organizes human intelligence to power the AI economy. We are building the layer between human expertise and frontier models, enabling millions of domain experts to train AI models. Mercor Enterprise provides Fortune 500 companies with infrastructure to capture and translate their best people's expertise into agents. We are a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion, seeking ambitious and committed individuals to join our team at the forefront of AI advancement.
As an Economist on the Marketplace team, you will apply economic theory and rigorous empirical methods to the core decision systems that govern talent and opportunity matching on Mercor. You will analyze and shape marketplace dynamics, including matching efficiency, pricing, incentives, liquidity, and supply/demand balance. Your insights will be translated into mechanisms and metrics that directly impact fill rate, hiring speed, earnings, and revenue, making this a high-impact role at the intersection of economics, data science, and engineering.
Responsibilities
- Design marketplace mechanisms for pricing, incentives, and allocation rules to balance supply and demand.
- Conduct causal measurement of marketplace health, including liquidity, match quality, fill rate, time-to-hire, and earnings.
- Design and execute A/B and marketplace/switchback experiments to evaluate interventions under interference.
- Develop forecasts and models for supply, demand, and capacity within the talent network.
- Frame ranking, matching, and routing objectives from an economic perspective in collaboration with ML and engineering teams.
- Quantify and mitigate marketplace failure modes such as cold start, congestion, thinness, and supply/demand imbalance.
- Measure the causal impact of matching and routing changes when market participants interfere with each other.
- Build supply/demand forecasts to inform capacity planning and sourcing decisions.
- Define objective functions and guardrail metrics for marketplace optimization.
Requirements
- Advanced degree (PhD or Master's) in Economics or a related quantitative field, or equivalent applied experience.
- Strong foundation in microeconomics/market design and causal inference/experimentation.
- Proficiency in SQL and Python or R for end-to-end data analysis.
- Ability to translate economic theory into mechanisms and metrics for live product deployment.
- Clear communication of rigorous analysis to both technical and business audiences.
- Experience with marketplaces, pricing, ranking/matching, or two-sided platforms.
- Familiarity with experimentation under interference (network or marketplace experiments).
- Experience partnering with ML and engineering teams to productionize models or mechanisms.
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