Research Engineer, Real Environments
- 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
You’ll work with large enterprises to capture their data and transform it into high-fidelity RL environments for capability evaluations and training datasets for frontier labs. We focus on pushing the frontier of world-building, verifier engineering, and more alongside our partners.
Your goal will be to automate the process of building evals for real work in the economy.
What You'll Do
- Ship models for workflow extraction, classification, and grading.
- Engineer autonomous task refinement processes which distill data taste into pipelines.
- Deliver data to customers and deploy into real engagements.
- Help define the future of agentic transformation for enterprises around the world.
- Deeply learn about the intricacies of enterprises through building evaluations for all aspects of work.
- Build end-to-end environments for labs & enterprises by platformizing sandbox app clones, load real data into the sandboxes, build prompts from real workflows, and write verifiers leveraging enterprise expertise & golden outputs.
- Systematize the production of environments to scale throughput while maintaining high-quality worlds and verifiers.
What We're Looking For
- Prior experience shipping environments – you’ve contributed to an OSS framework, built environments at previous companies, or worked on agentic evaluations.
- Strong full-stack engineering skills – you’ll be responsible for everything from infrastructure to app code to analytics
- Bias to action – this team is focused on shipping evals, not just philosophizing about them.
- Curiosity – being biased towards understanding and digging deep into model behavior and actually looking at the data.
- Sweat the details that make a simulation indistinguishable from the real thing and have systems-level thinking skills that allow you to scale up quality.
Nice to Have
- Experience with Temporal, Modal, or similar orchestration/compute services
- Experience with synthetic data generation for frontier models.Past work auditing and scrutinizing industry-standard evaluations
Benefits
- Semi-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
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
- 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
- Software Engineer, Agents posted Sep 18
From the team and dates on Mercor's own job board.
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