---
title: 'Product Manager, APEX at Mercor'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-apex-mercor-san-francisco-2d92wgtq86hz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Product Manager, APEX at Mercor

- **Company:** Mercor
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/bedec64a-ece8-498a-8f67-7b84acd32c75

## 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

Mercor’s AI Productivity Index (APEX) assesses how effectively frontier AI models can perform economically valuable work. We're looking for a Product Manager to own and scale the APEX brand and public leaderboard. In this role, you will define the positioning, strategy, roadmap, and operational excellence of Mercor's evaluation products, benchmarks, and public and private leaderboards. You will work across Research, Engineering, Operations, and Go-To-Market teams to transform evaluation datasets into trusted industry benchmarks that influence model development and purchasing decisions across the AI ecosystem. You will serve as the product owner for APEX and our eval platform, driving benchmark innovation, evaluation integrity, infrastructure, customer adoption, and business impact. You will work directly with frontier AI labs and enterprise customers, representing Mercor as a thought leader in AI evaluation and measurement. You will partner with Mercor’s world-class benchmark research team, which includes the first authors from many popular benchmarks including Tau Bench, SciCode, PostTrainBench, and more. The ideal candidate combines strong product judgment, technical fluency, operational rigor, and customer-facing experience, with a passion for turning emerging model capabilities into a credible measure of what AI can actually do for the economy.

## What You'll Do

- Own the roadmap and portfolio strategy: Set and influence priorities across new benchmark development, leaderboard launches, infrastructure investment, and expansion into new evaluation categories. Decide which domains earn a slot, when a benchmark has saturated, and what replaces it. Identify opportunity areas for strategic partnership.
- Run the intake for new benchmarks: Evaluate and prioritize proposals from research, customers, and GTM against real demand and company strategy.
- Enforce eval integrity: Own contamination policy, holdout strategy, versioning, auditability, and release cadence. Publish methodology clearly enough that a skeptical researcher can reconstruct our results.
- Build end-to-end eval pipeline: Own the path from eval run to published result, including harness execution, grading, model onboarding, hyperparameter scaffolds, cost and latency reporting, and the leaderboard surface itself.
- Work directly with labs and customers: Understand evaluation needs, present and defend results, and turn what you hear into the next benchmark. Support GTM on launches, partnerships, and thought leadership to influence customer model development strategies.
- Close the loop to the business: Connect leaderboard demand signals to loss analysis investments and dataset production. Track adoption, usage, and downstream revenue to continuously justify leaderboard ROI.
- Get in the weeds: Write specs and PRDs, but also read trajectories, spot-check failures, and make small PRs to unblock yourself and continuously improve the system.

## What We're Looking For

- Experience: 5+ years in product management, technical program management, or a customer-facing technical role. Prior background in SWE, ML, or DS strongly preferred.
- Eval literacy: You reason fluently about rubric design, inter-rater reliability, agentic harnesses, contamination and overfitting, and what a small sample can and can't support. You can tell a real capability gap from measurement noise.
- Public judgment: You'll publish numbers about other people's models. You know how to be neutral, precise, and defensible under scrutiny.
- Taste for what matters: Strong instincts for which capabilities are actually worth measuring, and what results are actually worth highlighting.
- Entrepreneurial: A track record of building a product, program, or business line from nothing.
- High Ownership: You take full accountability for outcomes, not just outputs.
- Independence: Able to self-direct in ambiguous contexts, creating clarity for others.
- Stakeholder alignment: You can bring research, engineering, operations, and GTM around a shared methodology.

## 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

- [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
- [Senior PMM, Evals](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-pmm-evals-mercor-mercor-hq-dd4w1930b4sy) — Mercor HQ, 181 Fremont Street
- [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