---
title: 'Early Career & University Recruiter at Mercor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/early-career-university-recruiter-mercor-new-york-4jxwsj4q054d'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Early Career & University Recruiter at Mercor

- **Company:** Mercor
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $120k–$200k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/54d73070-12c7-4c3a-be53-1ef6b0652a7a

## 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

We're looking for an Early Career & University Recruiter to build Mercor's university recruiting, early-career hiring, and internship programs from the ground up.

You'll own the strategy for how we identify, attract, and hire exceptional emerging talent across engineering, machine learning, and business functions. From developing university partnerships to creating new ways of finding talent beyond traditional recruiting channels, you'll help build the next generation of Mercor.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who can think strategically, execute independently, and build programs that scale.

## What You'll Do

- Build our early-career recruiting strategy: Develop and execute Mercor's approach to university recruiting, new-grad hiring, and internships, including target talent pools, recruiting calendars, and hiring plans.
- Find exceptional emerging talent: Identify and engage high-potential students and early-career professionals through creative sourcing strategies that go beyond traditional campus recruiting and established university pipelines.
- Own full-cycle recruiting: Drive sourcing, assessment, candidate engagement, and closing for intern and new-grad roles across engineering, ML, and business functions.
- Build and scale our internship program: Establish the recruiting framework, selection process, and return-offer strategy, partnering with hiring managers and People to create a strong intern experience.
- Create new talent pipelines: Develop initiatives such as hackathons, fellowships, student partnerships, and ambassador programs where they can meaningfully improve our ability to attract exceptional talent.
- Partner with leadership: Work closely with hiring managers and functional leaders to define early-career talent needs, establish hiring standards, and align recruiting plans with business priorities.
- Measure and improve outcomes: Establish the metrics and operating processes needed to evaluate program effectiveness, candidate quality, offer acceptance, and intern-to-full-time conversion.

## What We're Looking For

- 6+ years of recruiting experience, including meaningful ownership of university, early-career, or internship recruiting.
- Demonstrated experience building or significantly transforming an early-career recruiting program, with clear ownership and measurable results.
- Strong technical recruiting experience, particularly with engineering, computer science, or machine learning talent.
- Exceptional sourcing creativity and the ability to identify high-potential candidates beyond traditional credentials, universities, and employer brands.
- Ability to develop a strategy and independently translate it into execution without relying on established infrastructure.
- Strong stakeholder management, including the ability to influence hiring managers, challenge assumptions, and drive accountability.
- A data-driven approach to measuring recruiting effectiveness, improving processes, and making prioritization decisions.
- Willingness to travel for university partnerships, recruiting events, and other high-impact opportunities.

Nice to Haves

- Experience building early-career or university recruiting programs in a high-growth startup environment.
- Experience developing nontraditional talent pipelines, technical student communities, hackathons, or fellowship programs.
- Experience designing internship recruiting programs that have delivered strong intern-to-full-time conversion.

Ideal Qualities

- Agility / Adaptability - ability to move fast, pivot with business shifts, and maintain best-in-class outcomes
- Operational Rigor - ability to bring order to an unstructured environment
- Growth Mindset - You don’t need to be an expert on AI, but you do need to have a strong desire to learn and continue learning in a rapidly evolving, frontier industry
- Commitment to the Outcome - Ownership mentality; will hold themselves accountable to an extremely high standard of work
- Love for the Craft - we are building a zero to one motion; this hire will bring a low ego attitude to the table with a genuine love for building a best-in-class talent acquisition organization

## 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

- [Partnerships Lead, AI Infrastructure & Post-Training](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-ai-infrastructure-post-training-mercor-mercor-hq-kv8p4kg5hjmm) — Mercor Hq, 181 Fremont Street
- [Partnerships Lead, Consulting & SI Partners](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-lead-consulting-si-partners-mercor-mercor-hq-yzde539yj2wv) — Mercor Hq, 181 Fremont Street
- [Engagement Manager, Legal](https://feeny.ai/job/engagement-manager-legal-mercor-san-francisco-4wjy3zs32zva) — San Francisco, CA
- [Engagement Manager, Code](https://feeny.ai/job/engagement-manager-code-mercor-san-francisco-sa5jfvn94mhj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer, Discovery](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-discovery-mercor-san-francisco-32tkbxbvnznh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Discovery](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-discovery-mercor-san-francisco-y6tzdfe5gphn) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-growth-lead-mercor-san-francisco-z0mjagjqqm0y) — San Francisco, CA
- [GTM Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-recruiter-mercor-mercor-hq-4wtg3p9vdh5m) — Mercor Hq, 181 Fremont Street
- [G&A Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/g-a-recruiter-mercor-mercor-hq-paee976rd9dc) — Mercor Hq, 181 Fremont Street
- [Ops Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/ops-recruiter-mercor-mercor-hq-n76yb0v38rbp) — Mercor Hq, 181 Fremont Street