---
title: 'Data Science Intern at Mercor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-science-intern-mercor-san-francisco-4xjk5vaeyv5e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Data Science Intern at Mercor

- **Company:** Mercor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $70/hr
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/11516609-e54b-4087-87c2-e84a8bafbb5a

## 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.

## About the Role

As a Data Science Intern at Mercor, you’ll join a fast-moving, metrics-driven engineering team whose work shapes decisions across the company. You’ll analyze data that directly affects ranking, hiring efficiency, candidate experience and revenue, work with production datasets from your first week, and ship insights that product and engineering act on. You’ll start on the analyses and tooling your team has wanted but hasn’t had the hands for, and as needs come up you’ll take deep ownership of them, with a named mentor alongside you. You’ll move quickly while keeping a high bar for analytical rigor, clarity and statistical correctness.

Where You’ll Work Interns start on a rolling basis, so summer, spring and fall terms all work. About three weeks before your start we’ll match you to one of two teams:

- Product Data Science. The data science function for the marketplace and talent platform: metrics for matching, ranking and hiring efficiency, event instrumentation and data integrity, experiments on the candidate and customer experience, and scoring models that change who gets surfaced for which role.
- Applied AI Data Science. The data science function inside the org that delivers human data and evaluations to frontier AI labs: operational analytics for live customer projects, automated quality control that gates what ships, and evaluation science that shows a lab where its model breaks and why.

## What You’ll Work On

- Defining north-star metrics and feature-level KPIs for ranking, interview analytics and payouts
- Designing A/B tests and quasi-experiments and turning results into product decisions within days
- Building dashboards and lightweight data models so teams can self-serve insights
- Instrumenting events with engineers and improving data quality, observability and latency
- Prototyping models, from baselines to gradient boosting, to improve matching and scoring
- Evaluating LLM-powered systems through rubric design, human-in-the-loop experiments and guardrail testing

## What We’re Looking For

- Pursuing a degree in a quantitative field, graduating 2027 (potentially 2028)
- Strong fundamentals in statistics, SQL and Python
- Experience with experiment design, causal reasoning and data analysis
- Clear communication with engineers, product managers and leadership
- Curiosity about LLM evaluation, retrieval, ranking or marketplace dynamics
- Excited to work in person in San Francisco
- Nice to have: dbt, dashboarding tools, recommendation or search metrics, LLM and agent evaluation

## Why Mercor

- Impact: your work powers how frontier AI labs train and deploy their models
- Learning: early exposure to frontier AI research and engineering
- Growth: a high-velocity team where interns ship to production

## Compensation and Benefits

- $10K housing bonus if you live within 0.5 miles of our office during your internship
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals/rideshare
- Health, dental and vision insurance
- 401(k) eligibility

## 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

- [Pricing and Monetization Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/pricing-and-monetization-manager-mercor-san-francisco-j5x2n97q9a1k) — San Francisco, CA
- [Creative Director (IC)](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-ic-mercor-san-francisco-ezphmvqesgyx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Design Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-design-staff-mercor-san-francisco-q43xwabz87gr) — San Francisco, CA
- [Corporate Finance Senior / Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/corporate-finance-senior-associate-mercor-mercor-hq-a9a95pptzazv) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street
- [Chief of Staff, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-product-mercor-mercor-hq-vfwhvj7s42t0) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street
- [People Programs Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/people-programs-specialist-mercor-mercor-hq-5p0vgsxa98gn) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street
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- [Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-manager-mercor-mercor-hq-9m5b7mwswfem) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street
- [Research Intern](https://feeny.ai/job/research-intern-mercor-san-francisco-3pgbj0ap6ca9) — San Francisco, CA
- [G&A Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/g-a-recruiter-mercor-mercor-hq-hv24t8a3g9r4) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street