Software Engineer, Robotics
San Francisco, CA - USA
Department:
Job Summary
Mercors mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. Were 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. Mercors APEX benchmark family measures AIs 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. 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 San Francisco NYC or London offices.
Frontier AI is going physical and the labs building it are bottlenecked on one thing: high-quality data from the real world. Mercor pairs its operational scale with the specialized engineering that physical-world data demands.
As a Software Engineer on Robotics youll sit between Mercors data systems and our customers infrastructure. Every frontier lab wants something different: container format schema fields and quality requirements. Youll build infrastructure general enough that a new customer becomes a quick configuration and youll work directly with customer engineering teams on bespoke requests feeding what you learn into scalable platform architecture decisions. An example might be modifying the segmentation model derived from a customer request for stricter filtering on hands being in frame and building this into a configurable pipeline feature.
Prior robotics experience is not required. This is a backend and data engineering role at its core developing pipelines formats and storage methods. If youve built high-volume data infrastructure anywhere and want depth in robotics data and directly working directly with the engineers and researchers at the labs and robotics companies building physical AI this role is for you.
Own the reusable infrastructure behind robotics data deliveries: the processing packaging and delivery systems
Format and transform datasets to per-client specification: MCAP and other container formats custom schemas field mappings metadata and versioning
Work directly with customer engineering teams to scope and build bespoke schemas custom fields and one-off transforms where requirements are custom
Build and operate the pipelines that move data from Mercors systems into customer storage reliably at petabyte scale
Partner with operations and product to turn evolving requirements into shipped data deliveries and prototype quickly when a new data type or customer arrives
Build automated validation techniques
Strong backend and data engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python Go Rust) and comfort operating production systems on AWS and GCP
Experience building and owning high-volume data pipelines not just contributing to them
Experience with large binary formats streaming ingestion distributed batch processing and object storage economics
Customer-facing instincts: you can lead a technical conversation ask the right questions and push back when a request is unreasonable
Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively with a product team where requirements evolve with the customers and data types
Experience with robotics/AV data formats and tooling such as MCAP ROS protobuf Foxglove
Prior work on data engines pipelines or delivery for multimodal data
Multi-sensor data experience across video depth inertial and audio including calibration and synchronization
Forward-deployed solutions or delivery engineering experience at a data or infrastructure company
Computer vision or multimodal ML exposure: detection tracking or VLM-based labeling and QC
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
Required Experience:
IC