Tech Lead Manager, Frontier Data Products Multimodal

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 models increasingly depend on data that goes beyond text: images video audio documents and combinations of these modalities. Turning that raw material into useful data products is technically difficult. Each modality has different formats quality failures processing costs privacy considerations and review workflows. The final product still needs to be consistent traceable and trustworthy. Mercors Frontier Data Products team builds the systems that make these products possible. As Tech Lead Manager you will lead the team responsible for turning complex multimodal inputs into reliable customer-ready data products at scale. This is a player-coach role split roughly evenly between technical contribution and people leadership. You will write and review production code own important architecture decisions and help resolve the hardest production problems. You will also hire coach and organize a team that can operate with clear ownership and strong independent judgment. This is a product-engineering leadership role. Applied ML is part of the system but success is measured by the quality reliability and usefulness of the products deliverednot by research output alone

What Youll Do

• Set the technical and product strategy for Mercors multimodal data products.

• Design systems that support the full lifecycle of image video audio document and mixed-media datafrom initial inputs through processing review validation versioning and delivery.

• Create reusable abstractions across modalities while preserving the differences that matter for quality performance and customer requirements.

• Build quality systems that combine automated evaluation model-assisted checks expert review sampling and adjudication.

• Ensure that every output is traceable: what produced it what changed how it was evaluated and why it was accepted.

• Own the reliability performance and cost of storage-heavy compute-intensive long-running workflows.

• Stay hands-on by writing production code leading design reviews and directly contributing to the teams most consequential technical work.

• Manage and develop engineers through clear expectations frequent feedback thoughtful delegation and meaningful ownership.

• Partner with product ML operations and customer-facing teams to turn new customer needs into durable product capabilities rather than one-off solutions.

• Recruit and onboard engineers who raise the teams technical and execution bar.

What Makes This Role Different

• You will shape both the multimodal product architecture and the engineering team building it.

• The technical challenge extends beyond moving large media files. The system must preserve context relationships provenance and quality across different modalities and transformations.

• Customer requirements and available models will evolve quickly. The architecture must support new products without requiring the team to rebuild the system for every use case.

• The teams work sits directly between complex real-world inputs and the data products delivered to frontier AI customers.

What Success Looks Like

• The team can launch support for a new modality or product without building an entirely separate system.

• Product quality is measurable explainable and auditable across human and model-assisted workflows.

• Large long-running jobs are observable and recoverable with failures detected before they affect customer deliveries.

• Customer-specific work produces reusable capabilities that make the next product faster to build. - Engineers own substantial areas independently rather than depending on the manager for every technical decision.

• The team improves delivery speed while maintaining clear standards for quality reliability privacy and cost.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience managing a strong engineering team while remaining an effective hands-on technical leader.

• Deep experience designing and operating production backend distributed or data-intensive systems.

• Experience working with large unstructured data asynchronous processing metadata and versioning or compute-heavy workflows.

• Relevant experience in at least one area such as multimedia infrastructure computer-vision data video or audio processing ML platforms annotation systems or human-in-the-loop products.

• Strong judgment about platform boundaries: what should be generalized across modalities and what should remain modality-specific.

• A track record of taking ambiguous zero-to-one products through architecture launch and sustained production operation.

• Evidence that you can recruit coach and retain excellent engineers while maintaining a high performance bar.

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

Required Experience:

Manager