# Research Engineer – Benchmarking at Mercor

- Company: Mercor
- What the company does: Mercor is organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy. We are powering frontier research, AI benchmarks, and AI agent training at scale for the top AI labs and enterprises. Backed by General Catalyst and Menlo.
- Company website: https://mercor.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $180K to $500K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-18
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/40cc6334-3a6c-42f8-a4ec-d490486d00e8
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/mercor-research-engineer-benchmarking/

## About the role

As a Research Engineer at Mercor, you’ll work at the intersection of engineering and applied AI research. You’ll own benchmarking pipelines, evaluation systems, and failure analysis workflows that directly inform how we train and improve frontier language models. Your work will define how we measure tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning. You’ll design and run evals, build rubrics and scorers, and turn failure analysis into actionable improvements for post-training, RLVR, and data pipelines.

## What they're looking for

- Strong applied research background, with focus on model evaluation, benchmarking, and/or failure analysis
- Strong coding skills and hands-on experience with ML models and evaluation code
- Solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and backend systems
- Comfort with APIs, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud platforms for running and storing eval results
- Ability to reason about model behavior, experimental results, and data quality from evals and failure analyses
- Excitement to work in person in San Francisco five days a week in a high-intensity, high-ownership environment

Tags: Research