Mercor
Software Engineer, Search Systems - Code Data
$250K–$500K
San Francisco · On-site · Full-time · Posted Aug 14, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Senior level or above.
About the job
Own and build Mercor’s code search and retrieval systems, including finding similar code tasks, routing tasks to code-specific models, and translating natural-language questions into precise searches.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and operate hybrid retrieval, ranking, indexing, and serving systems for code tasks.
- Set technical strategy, evaluate search quality, and evolve embeddings and models while preventing regressions.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership, including design reviews, mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration.
What they ask for
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Senior level or above, with a Staff-level track record of org-wide technical impact.
- Hands-on expertise in search and retrieval systems, including dense embeddings, BM25/TF-IDF, hybrid ranking, and re-ranking.
- Strong understanding of search algorithms and index internals, plus experience balancing latency, throughput, memory, and infrastructure costs on high-QPS systems.
- Distributed systems, data modeling, and API design at scale; demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship.
Nice to have
- Experience with code search or code understanding.
- Experience training or fine-tuning code models, learning-to-rank or production semantic search, LLM-based retrieval, or latency-critical cloud services.
Pay
$250K – $500K USD base salary
Tools
BM25, TF-IDF, HNSW, IVF, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Lucene, FAISS
AI focus
Build code retrieval and model-routing systems that support training and evaluating frontier coding models; evolve code embeddings and models and translate natural-language questions into search queries.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative