Research Engineer Intern
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Job Location:
San Francisco, CA - USA
Hourly Salary:
$ 40 - 75
Posted on:
22 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Department:
Job Summary
About Mercor
Mercor is at the intersection of labor markets and AI research. We partner with leading AI labs and enterprises to provide the human intelligence essential to AI development.
Our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers teach students: by sharing knowledge experience and context that cant be captured in code alone. Today more than 30000 experts in our network collectively earn over $1.5 million a day.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious fast-paced and deeply committed team. Youll 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 new San Francisco headquarters.
About the Role
As a Research Engineer Intern at Mercor youll work at the intersection of engineering and cutting-edge AI research. Youll contribute directly to post-training and RLVR data generation and large-scale evaluation workflows. Your work will be used to train Large Language Models to master tool-use agentic behavior and real-world reasoning. Youll shape rewards experiment with algorithmic improvements (GRPO DAPO etc.) and enhance data quality to improve model performance in real production environments. Youll help design and evaluate datasets create scalable data augmentation pipelines and build rubrics that push the boundaries of what LLMs can learn.
What Youll Do
Work on post-training and RLVR pipelines to help Mercor understand how datasets impact model performance.
Design and run reward-shaping experiments and algorithmic improvements (e.g. GRPO DAPO) to improve LLM tool-use agentic behavior and real-world reasoning.
Quantify data usability quality and uplift on key benchmarks.
Build data generation and augmentation pipelines that scale with training needs.
Create and refine rubrics evaluators and scoring frameworks that push the boundaries of what LLMs can learn.
Collaborate closely with research engineers applied AI teams and experts producing data.
Operate in a fast-paced experimental research environment with rapid iteration cycles.
What Were Looking For
Pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a related field (graduating ); ability to start in early 2026 is strongly preferred.
Strong programming skills in Python Go or JavaScript with an ability to write clean reliable production-grade code.
Understanding of data structures algorithms backend systems and core engineering fundamentals.
Familiarity with APIs SQL/NoSQL databases and cloud platforms.
Curiosity and passion for AI research reinforcement learning and fast-moving startups.
Excitement to work in person and thrive in a high-intensity high-ownership engineering environment.
Nice To Have
Real-world post-training team experience in industry
Work samples artifacts or code repositories demonstrating relevant skills
Publications at ACL NeurIPS or ICML conferences
Experience training models or evaluating model performance
Benefits
Competitive internship stipend.
Mentorship from experienced engineers.
Work on real high-impact projects.
$1K monthly stipend for meals
Free Equinox membership
Team events and offsites.
Potential full-time return offer.
Required Experience:
Intern
Key Skills
- Robotics
- Machine Learning
- Python
- AI
- C/C++
- Data Collection
- Research Experience
- Signal Processing
- Natural Language Processing
- Computer Vision
- Deep Learning
- Tensorflow
