MLOps Engineer AI Systems AI Trainer

About the job

Mercor connects elite creative and technical talent with leading AI research labs. Headquartered in San Francisco our investors include Benchmark General Catalyst Peter Thiel Adam DAngelo Larry Summers and Jack Dorsey.

Position: MLOps Engineer LLM Performance (Kernels Profiling Serving)
Type: Contract
Compensation: $90$120/hour
Location: Remote
Commitment: 40 hours/week

Role Responsibilities

• Design challenging tasks across kernels profiling debugging and inference serving. Write accurate well-structured solutions to expose where frontier models fail on accelerator code.
• Guide research and engineering teams to close knowledge gaps and improve AI model performance on ML systems compilers and training infrastructure topics.
• Evaluate ML systems tasks and solutions. Provide clear written technical feedback that stands up to expert review.
• Develop guidelines and detailed rubrics covering kernel optimization profiler output interpretation distributed systems reasoning and serving throughput and latency trade-offs.
• Collaborate with other subject matter experts to keep training data consistent and accurate.

Qualifications

Must-Have

• 2 years of hands-on professional experience in ML systems ML infrastructure model serving or accelerator performance engineering.
• Practical experience in writing or optimizing custom kernels (Pallas Triton CUDA CUTLASS) performance profiling and trace analysis (JAX/XLA profiler Kineto Nsight) debugging distributed or accelerator-bound workloads serving large language models at scale (vLLM SGLang TensorRT-LLM JetStream KV cache paged attention continuous batching).
• Working production experience with JAX and/or PyTorch. Framework-level depth is a strong plus: custom operators sharding and distributed training (pjit/shardmap FSDP Megatron MaxText) or compiler and graph-level work (XLA/StableHLO MLIR).
• Experience with modern accelerators such as TPU (v4 to v6e) H100 B200 Trainium or MI300 and the ability to reason about throughput latency and memory trade-offs.
• Demonstrable career progression.
• Ability to engage reliably for at least 40 hours/week during weekdays.
• Strong written communication skills and the ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly.

Compensation & Legal

• Hourly contractor
• Paid weekly via Stripe Connect

Application Process (Takes 2030 mins to complete)

• Upload resume
• AI interview based on your resume
• Submit form

Resources & Support

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