Tech Lead Manager, Frontier Data Products
New York City • FullTime
Posted 5d ago
Job Location
New York City
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Mercor is seeking a Tech Lead Manager for their Frontier Data Products team, focusing on multimodal data. This role is a player-coach position, balancing technical contributions with people leadership. You will be responsible for designing and building systems that handle the full lifecycle of multimodal data (image, video, audio, documents, mixed-media), ensuring data quality, traceability, reliability, performance, and cost-effectiveness. The goal is to turn complex multimodal inputs into reliable, customer-ready data products at scale, enabling the team to support new modalities and products efficiently. This is a product-engineering leadership role where success is measured by the quality and usefulness of the delivered products.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical and product strategy for multimodal data products.
- Design systems for the full lifecycle of multimodal data, from input to delivery.
- Create reusable abstractions across modalities while preserving modality-specific differences.
- Build quality systems combining automated evaluation, model-assisted checks, expert review, sampling, and adjudication.
- Ensure all outputs are traceable (producer, changes, evaluation, acceptance).
- Own the reliability, performance, and cost of storage-heavy, compute-intensive workflows.
- Write production code, lead design reviews, and contribute to consequential technical work.
- Manage and develop engineers through clear expectations, feedback, delegation, and ownership.
- Partner with product, ML, operations, and customer-facing teams to build durable product capabilities.
- Recruit and onboard engineers to raise the team's technical and execution bar.
Requirements
- Experience managing a strong engineering team while remaining an effective, hands-on technical leader.
- Deep experience designing and operating production backend, distributed, or data-intensive systems.
- Experience with large unstructured data, asynchronous processing, metadata and versioning, or compute-heavy workflows.
- Relevant experience in multimedia infrastructure, computer-vision data, video/audio processing, ML platforms, annotation systems, or human-in-the-loop products.
- Strong judgment about platform boundaries (generalizable vs. modality-specific).
- Track record of taking ambiguous, zero-to-one products through architecture, launch, and sustained production operation.
- Evidence of ability to recruit, coach, and retain excellent engineers while maintaining a high performance bar.
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15k Relocation bonus
- $10K housing bonus (if living within 0.5 miles of office)