Product Operations Manager, Research Services
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 26d ago
About the job
Mercor is seeking a Product Operations Manager, Research Services to drive operational excellence in supporting full-service research partnerships. This role involves prioritizing and managing delivery across various strategic customer segments to support model evaluations, diagnose model capability gaps, and fulfill post-training demand. It's a highly technical, internally-facing position at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Data Production, GTM, Finance, and Strategic Partnerships, crucial for organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy.
Responsibilities
- Own the intake and prioritization of new benchmarks and evaluations.
- Run and share leaderboard evaluations to drive research brand equity.
- Manage relationships with inference providers, compute partners, and external training vendors, including forecasting capacity, negotiating SLAs, and monitoring costs.
- Track the operating picture across all active evaluations, loss analysis, and post-training engagements, highlighting scope, milestones, dependencies, and SLA status.
- Translate recurring delivery friction into product requirements and partner with Engineering to automate workflows.
Requirements
- 3+ years in Product Operations, Product Management, Technical Program Management, Research Operations, Solutions Engineering, or a similar technical, customer-facing role.
- Experience operating in an ML research or AI infrastructure environment is strongly preferred.
- Fluent in modern LLM evaluation, including harness design, verification, agentic rollouts, and contamination/fairness pitfalls.
- Working understanding of post-training (SFT, preference ranking, RL) and inference economics.
- Familiar with coding agents; comfortable in SQL and Python.
- Ability to plan capacity against uncertain demand, hold partners to SLAs, and weigh cost against reliability.
- Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments and take ownership from problem definition through execution.
- Ability to hold technical conversations with AI researchers and write executive-level status updates.
- Strong project management and cross-functional coordination skills.
- Passion for fixing problems at the source and building repeatable systems.
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