Software Engineer, Applied AI - Frontier Engineering (NYC)
$160k - $500k • New York City • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
New York City
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
Mercor is seeking a Software Engineer for their Applied AI - Frontier Engineering team to build, deploy, and operate systems that bridge frontier AI research and data delivery. This role involves high ownership and deep technical work, tackling ill-defined problems, prototyping with researchers and customers, and scaling systems from experiments to production. You will manage projects end-to-end, including requirements gathering, data creation pipelines, and improving model-adjacent infrastructure, while collaborating with AI labs and internal teams to deliver impactful applied AI solutions.
Responsibilities
- Partner with frontier AI labs to understand their data, post-training, and evaluation needs.
- Build and operate scalable data pipelines for post-training workflows and model evaluations.
- Design and build scalable systems for synthetic data generation and data quality.
- Work directly with customers to understand requirements and develop technical solutions.
- Prototype new data types, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks.
- Lead technical discussions with customers.
Requirements
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust, etc.).
- Experience with model training and inference.
- Strong grounding in statistical analysis and experimental design for measuring model performance and improvements.
- Familiarity with evaluation methods for large language models.
- Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively.
- Enjoy ownership and customer-facing problem solving.
- Think entrepreneurially and move quickly.
- Balance speed with engineering rigor.
- Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical users.
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15k Relocation bonus
- $10K proximity 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