---
title: 'Data Platform Engineer at Mercor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-platform-engineer-mercor-san-francisco-qykf5njsc770'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Data Platform Engineer at Mercor

- **Company:** Mercor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $130k–$500k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/415d2ee3-44b9-40e5-ab4b-04340faa3872

## Job description

## 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. What This Person Owns The infrastructure every data-driven team at Mercor runs on: Snowflake, Fivetran, Airflow, and Hex. You own how data is organized, who can access what, what it costs to run, and how reliably it operates. This is a foundational hire on a new Data Platform team, you'll help set the standards other engineers build against. What They Do Day-to-Day

- Bring structure and clear ownership to how data is organized in Snowflake across projects and teams
- Design narrow, role-based access controls, and partner with automation so access is granted and revoked as people join, change teams, or leave
- Extend row access policies and PII masking across all sensitive datasets
- Migrate data from a variety of vendor and internal sources into properly owned, governed homes
- Own Fivetran connector health and cost, Airflow/Astronomer pipeline reliability and on-call, and Hex governance across company-wide dashboards
- Monitor and right-size Snowflake warehouse spend
- Help build CDC/streaming ingestion and other internal data platform tooling

## What We're Looking For

- Hands-on experience with Snowflake administration: roles, grants, warehouses, cost/performance tuning
- Experience designing data access and governance models (RBAC, row-level security, PII) at scale
- Comfort owning vendor tooling end to end (Fivetran, Airflow/Astronomer, or similar), including on-call
- Track record migrating or re-architecting live production data systems without breaking dependent teams
- Strong SQL and Python, with infrastructure fluency to make judgment calls, not just execute a spec
- Experience owning CDC/streaming pipelines in production (Debezium, Kafka, Snowpipe Streaming or similar), including reasoning about delivery semantics, partitioning, and safe cutovers between systems.

## 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

## About Mercor

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Mercor organizes human intelligence to power the AI economy by connecting domain experts with frontier AI labs and enterprises for model training, evaluation, and deployment.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with offices in New York City and London)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath (Co-founders & Co-CEOs)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: AI Data & Infrastructure, Human-in-the-Loop AI, Enterprise AI
- Target customers: Frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), Fortune 500 enterprises deploying AI in production, and domain experts seeking high-value AI work
- Mission: Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy — building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.

## Products & Services
- **Mercor Platform**: A global network of millions of domain experts across 300+ professional fields, paid over $3 million per day to train frontier AI models. Experts are found and vetted using dynamic, role-specific AI interviews.
- **APEX Benchmark**: A benchmark family that measures AI's real-world impact on professional work, setting a standard for whether AI can perform economically valuable work.
- **Mercor Enterprise**: Brings Mercor's expert network and evaluation infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies, deploying custom AI agents, staffing teams with vetted domain experts, and helping organizations encode their own knowledge into AI systems.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $10 billion valuation (as of Series C)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $350 million Series C (recently raised); company is profitable
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not explicitly named in provided sources, but the company works with leading AI labs and Fortune 500 enterprises
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Named to Bloomberg's "2026 24 AI Startups to Watch"
  - Forbes AI 50 (2025)
  - Forbes Cloud 100 (2025)
  - LinkedIn Top Startup (2025)
  - Described as "the fastest-growing company in the world"
  - Tens of thousands of skilled professionals earning an average of more than $95/hour on the platform

## Competitive Advantages
- **Massive, vetted expert network**: Millions of domain experts across 300+ fields, found and vetted via AI-driven interviews — a hard-to-replicate moat.
- **Direct frontier model exposure**: Every team works directly with frontier models, training them and building around them — most companies haven't imagined this level of integration.
- **Profitability at scale**: Profitable at Series C with a $10B valuation, indicating strong unit economics.
- **End-to-end AI infrastructure**: From expert sourcing and vetting to model evaluation (APEX) to enterprise deployment — a vertically integrated stack.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the expert network**: Continuing to onboard millions of domain experts globally to meet the insatiable demand for high-quality human training data.
- **Enterprise AI deployment**: Expanding Mercor Enterprise to help Fortune 500 companies encode organizational knowledge into AI systems and deploy custom agents.
- **Benchmarking AI's economic impact**: Growing the APEX benchmark as the standard for measuring whether AI can perform economically valuable work.
- **Preparing for AGI**: The company's founding thesis is about answering what role humans will play in the economy as AGI approaches.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: "Built for people who thrive in high-velocity environments." Values include Intensity, Simplicity, User Obsession, High Standards, Can-Do Attitude, and Time Travelers (thinking ahead).
- **Work model**: In-person collaboration from offices in San Francisco, New York City, and London. No remote option — the company believes in-person collaboration helps move faster and solve harder problems.
- **Engineering culture**: Direct exposure to frontier AI research, labs, and startups. Every team works with frontier models daily. Described as "the fastest-growing company in the world."
- **Compensation**: Generous equity grants, competitive salaries (ranges from $100K–$500K depending on role), and a "proximity bonus" (generous annual housing support).
- **Benefits**: 
  - Unlimited paid vacation and sick days
  - Free Equinox membership (premium fitness access)
  - Monthly wellness stipend and free mental health services
  - Monthly food stipend
  - 401k with employer match
  - Parental leave for both birthing and non-birthing parents
- **Team**: "A team of ambitious, diverse people who want to work on what matters most." Open roles across Engineering (31 roles), Operations (15 roles), Enterprise (5 roles), Finance (4 roles), and more.

## Sources
1. [mercor.com](https://www.mercor.com/)
2. [mercor.com/careers](https://www.mercor.com/careers/)
3. [mercor.com/mission](https://www.mercor.com/mission/)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor)
5. [linkedin.com/company/mercor-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/mercor-ai)

## Other roles at Mercor

- [Strategic Project Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-project-associate-mercor-mexico-city-e3jz5884p6jv) — Mexico City, Mexico
- [Strategic Project Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-project-lead-mercor-mexico-city-q4w7ryfm5va5) — Mexico City, Mexico
- [Security GRC Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/security-grc-lead-mercor-san-francisco-mxdykv6dze58) — San Francisco, CA
- [Tech Lead Manager, Frontier Data Products](https://feeny.ai/job/tech-lead-manager-frontier-data-products-mercor-new-york-dbjederem7zf) — New York, NY
- [Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-mercor-san-francisco-1t8t2mejenj2) — San Francisco, CA
- [Security Engineer, Application Security](https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-application-security-mercor-san-francisco-5z2pbdwzrw0n) — San Francisco, CA
- [Technology Operations Specialist (L3)](https://feeny.ai/job/technology-operations-specialist-l3-mercor-san-francisco-evpqqw1fmc47) — San Francisco, CA
- [Cloud Platform Engineer (SF)](https://feeny.ai/job/cloud-platform-engineer-sf-mercor-san-francisco-0c9b2zbpmk8g) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer, Applied AI](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-applied-ai-mercor-new-york-29sf9gcj7j2s) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineer, Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-platform-mercor-new-york-8rn1qgb4yxmm) — New York, NY