Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. 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 can't be captured in code alone. Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $2 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. 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
As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Mercor, you’ll own production reliability across our most critical systems, partnering directly with infrastructure leadership. You’ll play a foundational role in building our SRE function from the ground up and shaping how Mercor operates large-scale, high-availability systems.
What You’ll Do
Own reliability and production safety for core shared services and customer-facing systems.
Partner directly with infrastructure leadership to define SRE priorities, reliability standards, and production safety roadmap.
Repair and improve how our production systems are structured so they are stable, resource-efficient, isolated, and well-observed.
Introduce and champion modern SRE practices (e.g., incident response, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs) across engineering teams.
Collaborate with leverage engineering and applied AI teams to ensure sustainable growth.
Represent SRE best practices internally and help teams onboard onto production in a way that is safe, scalable, and consistent with SRE principles.
What We’re Looking For
Experience doing true SRE work (not just operations) across multiple roles or companies.
Deep familiarity with SRE practices as popularized by Google (e.g., error budgets, reliability vs. risk trade-offs, large-scale distributed systems).
5+ years of SRE experience; 15+ years of overall experience is ideal for this first SRE hire.
Proven success operating systems at scale, with a strong understanding of the challenges of large, distributed production environments.
Strong collaboration skills; able to work efficiently with cross-functional engineering teams.
Ability to drive cultural change around reliability while remaining hands-on in building and fixing systems.
Comfort working in high-intensity, high-availability environments where uptime and production quality are critical.
Nice to Haves
Experience as a founding SRE or early SRE hire, standing up SRE practices and orgs from scratch.
Hands-on experience in the AWS ecosystem, Kubernetes, and modern IaC tooling (Terraform, Spacelift, etc.).
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
Skills Required
- 5+ years of SRE experience
- Deep familiarity with SRE practices
- Proven success operating systems at scale
- Strong collaboration skills
- Experience in high-intensity environments
Mercor Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Mercor and has not been reviewed or approved by Mercor.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive across many roles, with clear hourly ranges and an hourly/pay‑per‑task mix designed to align rates with expertise. The structure emphasizes transparent, appropriate pay levels and guarantees payment for legitimate logged time.
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Strong & Reliable Incentives — Payments are processed on a predictable weekly cadence via Stripe/Wise, and some tracks offer additional weekly bonus incentives for top performers. This combination of regular payouts and performance bonuses supports dependable earnings when projects are active.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Select full‑time roles include generous equity grants alongside cash perks such as relocation and housing bonuses. These elements increase total compensation for those positions.
Mercor Insights
What We Do
We use AI to understand human ability and match talent with the opportunities they're best suited for.
