Data Scientist
- Salary
- $160K - $500K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 9 September 2026.
About the role
About Mercor
Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
What you’ll do
In your first year you’ll ship analyses and experiments that move core product metrics, match quality, time-to-hire, candidate experience, and revenue. You’ll:
- Define north-star and feature-level metrics for our ranking, interview analytics, and payouts systems.
- Design/run A/B tests and quasi-experiments; turn results into product decisions the same week.
- Build source-of-truth dashboards and lightweight data models so teams can self-serve answers.
- Instrument events with engineers; improve data quality and latency from ingestion to insight.
- Prototype quick models (from baselines to gradient boosting) to improve matching and scoring.
- Help evaluate LLM-powered agents: design rubrics, human-in-the-loop studies, and guardrail canaries.
You’ll thrive here if
You have solid fundamentals (statistics, SQL, Python) and projects you’re proud to demo. You iterate fast, frame the question, test, and ship in day, and care as much about clarity of communication as you do about p-values. Curiosity about LLM evaluation, retrieval, and ranking is a bonus; you’ll learn alongside folks who’ve shipped at Jane Street, Citadel, Databricks, and Stripe.
Qualifications
- 0–10 years in data science/analytics or similar; BS/BA in a quantitative field (or equivalent work).
- Strong SQL; Python for analysis; comfort with experiment design and causal thinking.
- Communicates crisply with engineers, PMs, and leadership; turns analysis into action.
- Nice-to-haves: dbt, dashboarding (Hex/Mode/Looker), marketplace or search/recommendation metrics, LLM/agent evaluation.
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
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
Databricks · Looker · dbt
Rare in Mercor's other 68 open postings.
Standard for data science / ML roles
LLM · Python · SQL
Common in data science / ML postings at any company.
Read against Mercor's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 22 open in Engineering. 3 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in August: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
LLM (6 of 22), Python (5 of 22), SQL (4 of 22), CI/CD (3 of 22), REST (3 of 22), Terraform (3 of 22), Golang (2 of 22)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Member of Design Staff posted Oct 14
- Tech Lead, Systems & Platform Applied AI posted Sep 24
- Software Engineer, Systems & Platform Applied AI posted Sep 24
- Delivery Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted Sep 15
- Data Platform Engineer posted Sep 10
- Tech Lead Manager, Frontier Data Products posted Sep 8
- Infrastructure Software Engineer posted Sep 5
- Lead Brand Designer posted Aug 31
- Senior Product Manager, Payments posted Aug 25
- Payments Engineer posted Aug 19
- Product Manager, APEX posted Aug 19
- Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data posted Aug 14
- Fullstack Software Engineer, Agent Platform posted Aug 11
- Product Manager, Trust & Safety posted Aug 11
- Technical Recruiter posted Aug 3
- Product Manager, Mobile posted Jul 25
- Product Manager, Applied AI posted Jul 25
- Member of Technical Staff, iOS posted Jul 17
- Product Manager posted Jun 29
- Engineering Manager, Fraud & Compliance posted Jun 19
- Engineering Manager, Applied AI posted Jun 19
From the team and dates on Mercor's own job board.
Salary context
70 other open postings titled Data Scientist state a salary: median USD 133,560 to USD 199,500 a year.
See Data Scientist salaries in San Francisco →
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