Mercor
Software Engineer, Applied AI - Frontier Engineering
$160K–$500K
San Francisco · On-site · Full-time · Posted Apr 21, 2026
About the job
Build and operate applied AI infrastructure and data systems for frontier model training, post-training, and evaluation, from prototypes through production.
What you'll do
- Partner with frontier AI labs and customers to understand data, post-training, evaluation, and technical requirements.
- Build scalable data pipelines and systems for synthetic data generation, data quality, and model evaluations.
- Prototype data types, benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks; lead technical discussions with customers.
What they ask for
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals in a modern language.
- Experience with model training and inference.
- Strong grounding in statistical analysis and experimental design for measuring model performance and improvements.
- Familiarity with evaluation methods for large language models.
Pay
$160K – $500K (base salary)
Tools
Python, Go, Rust
AI focus
Build data pipelines, synthetic data systems, benchmarks, and evaluation infrastructure supporting frontier model post-training and evaluation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative