Tech Lead Manager, Frontier Data Products
$300k - $420k • New York City • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
New York City
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Machine Learning Engineer
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. Our mission involves creating a new category of work where expertise drives AI advancement, requiring an ambitious and committed team working at the forefront of AI systems.
The Frontier Data Products team is responsible for transforming complex multimodal inputs (images, video, audio, documents) into reliable, customer-ready data products at scale. This role is a player-coach position, balancing technical contributions with people leadership, including writing production code, owning architectural decisions, and resolving complex production issues. It also involves hiring, coaching, and organizing a team to operate with clear ownership and independent judgment, focusing on product quality, reliability, and usefulness.
Responsibilities
- Set the technical and product strategy for multimodal data products.
- Design systems for the full lifecycle of multimodal data, including processing, review, validation, versioning, and delivery.
- Create reusable abstractions across different data modalities.
- Build quality systems incorporating automated evaluation, model-assisted checks, and expert review.
- Ensure traceability for all outputs, detailing their origin, changes, evaluation, and acceptance.
- Own the reliability, performance, and cost of storage-heavy and compute-intensive workflows.
- Write production code, lead design reviews, and contribute to key 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 enhance the team's technical and execution capabilities.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.
- 1+ year of experience managing an engineering team while remaining a hands-on technical leader.
- 3+ years of 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.
- Experience in multimedia infrastructure, computer-vision data, video or audio processing, ML platforms, annotation systems, or human-in-the-loop products is a plus.
- Strong judgment regarding platform boundaries for generalization across modalities.
- 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
- Up to $15k Relo