Software Engineer, Agents
- 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.
About the Role
We're looking for a strong engineer who can build agentic products that scale. You will work with:
- Backend: Python, FastAPI, Django, Pydantic
- Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind
- Data: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, DuckDB, Redis
- Orchestration/Infra: Kubernetes, Temporal, Modal, Woz
- Agents/LLM: LangGraph, LangChain, FastMCP, Harbor, NemoGym
- Observability: Datadog, PostHog, LangSmith
At the end of the process, you’ll be team-matched to where you can have the most impact, on one of the following:
- Automation – We build intelligent systems and agents that automate operational work at scale—handling talent management, decision-making insights, and knowledge access—so humans can focus on higher-level thinking.This is a newly formed, CEO-facing team focused on 0→1 product development, with a strong emphasis on business impact. The work is highly cross-functional, touching nearly every system across the company.
- Studio – We own Mercor’s evaluation system & annotation platform for RL environments and tasks. We build harnesses, agents, verifiers, and the end-to-end infrastructure for producing frontier data. Our mission is to scale up high quality RL environments/tasks and expand their capabilities. We work closely with researchers at frontier AI labs to jointly shape the direction of next-generation models.
What You’ll Do
- Own agentic features end-to-end — from scoping with researchers/ops partners through implementation, launch, and iteration on real customer feedback.
- Design and ship LLM agents, harnesses, and verifiers — including the tools, prompts, and policies that make them reliable.
- Build the Python/FastAPI services and Temporal/Modal pipelines that orchestrate agent runs, human-in-the-loop review and iterations.
- Build state of the art RL environments that expand the capabilities of frontier agents, with realistic enterprise apps, simulated coworkers, and rich company data rooms that support tasks spanning hours to days.
- Build tooling that turns agent trajectories into insight, from statistical analysis to automated failure mode detection.
- Build and refine the full-stack surfaces and data infrastructure — craft Next.js/React interfaces where operators and experts work with agents, evolve data models to give agents the structured context and audit trails they need.
- Define agent quality and drive continuous improvement — build evals, instrument traces, analyze failure modes, and iterate on prompts, tools, and guardrails while raising the bar for reliability, cost, latency, and UX.
- Partner cross-functionally to shape agent autonomy — work with Product, Design, Research and Ops to draw the lines between autonomous action, propose-and-approve flows, and human-in-the-loop decisions.
Why Mercor
- Impact: Your work powers how the world’s leading AI labs train and test their models.
- Learning: Get early insights into frontier model capabilities months before the market.
- Growth: Work on both infrastructure and research-adjacent projects with fast paths to ownership.
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
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
Read against Mercor's other open postings on this site.
The team: Core Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 22 open in Core Engineering. 1 was posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in September: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Python (12 of 22), LLM (10 of 22), PostgreSQL (8 of 22), GitHub (5 of 22), Kubernetes (5 of 22), Machine Learning (5 of 22), TypeScript (5 of 22)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Software Engineer, Robotics posted Sep 22
- Software Engineer, Platform posted Sep 4
- Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Systems posted Sep 1
- Product Engineer, Talent Experience posted Aug 31
- Software Engineer, Agents posted Aug 27
- Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted Aug 27
- Software Engineer, Marketplace posted Aug 26
- Member of Technical Staff, Mercor Enterprise Platform posted Aug 21
- Product Engineer, Studio Platform posted Aug 18
- Member of Technical Staff, Enterprise Evals Platform posted Aug 15
- Member of Technical Staff, Deeptune Environments posted Aug 10
- Software Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted Aug 7
- Member of Technical Staff, Backend posted Jul 25
- Research Engineer, Real Environments posted Jul 24
- Software Engineer, Backend posted Jul 14
- Software Engineer, Identity posted Jul 1
- Software Engineer, Machine Learning posted Jun 30
- Machine Learning Engineer, Frontier Data Products posted May 29
- Data Engineer posted May 7
- Software Engineer, Platform posted Apr 23
- Software Engineer, Automation posted Mar 12
From the team and dates on Mercor's own job board.
Salary context
5 other open postings titled Software Engineer, Agents state a salary: median USD 160,000 to USD 300,000 a year.
See Software Engineer salaries in San Francisco →
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