{"id":3375492,"url":"https://alion.io/job/mercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking","title":"Research Engineer, Intern – Benchmarking","company":{"id":4960,"name":"Mercor","domain":"mercor.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/mercor","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":true,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":85,"open_postings":15,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.4,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":65,"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":70,"max":70,"currency":"USD","period":"hour","gross":null,"usd_annual":140000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-27T23:25:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-27","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T17:54:54Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":5,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":5},"description":"About Mercor\nMercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're 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. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's 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.\nMercor 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.\nAbout the Role\nAs a Research Engineer at Mercor, you’ll work at the intersection of engineering and applied AI research. You’ll own benchmarking pipelines, evaluation systems, and failure analysis workflows that directly inform how we train and improve frontier language models.\nYour work will define how we measure tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning. You’ll design and run evals, build rubrics and scorers, and turn failure analysis into actionable improvements for post-training, RLVR, and data pipelines.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBenchmarking: Design, implement, and maintain benchmarks and metrics for tool use, agentic behavior, and real-world reasoning; ensure benchmarks scale with training and stay aligned with product and research goals.\n\nEvaluation systems: Build and operate LLM evaluation systems end-to-end runs, scoring, dashboards, and reporting, so researchers and applied AI teams can track model performance and compare runs at scale.\n\nFailure analysis: Run systematic failure analysis on model outputs (e.g., wrong tool use, reasoning errors, safety/alignment issues); categorize failure modes, quantify prevalence, and feed findings into reward design, data curation, and benchmark design.\n\nRubrics and evaluators: Create and refine rubrics, automated evaluators, and scoring frameworks that drive training and evaluation decisions; balance rigor with scalability (human vs. model-as-judge, calibration, agreement).\n\nData quality and usability: Quantify data usability, quality, and impact on key benchmarks; use evals and failure analysis to guide data generation, augmentation, and curation.\n\nCross-team collaboration: Work with AI researchers, applied AI teams, and data producers to align evals with training objectives and to prioritize benchmarks and failure analyses that matter most.\n\nOwnership in a fast-paced environment: Operate in a high-iteration research setting with strong ownership of benchmarks, evals, and failure-analysis workflows.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\nStrong applied research background, with focus on model evaluation, benchmarking, and/or failure analysis.\n\nStrong coding skills and hands-on experience with ML models and evaluation code.\n\nSolid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and backend systems.\n\nComfort with APIs, SQL/NoSQL, and cloud platforms for running and storing eval results.\n\nAbility to reason about model behavior, experimental results, and data quality from evals and failure analyses.\n\nExcitement to work in person in San Francisco five days a week in a high-intensity, high-ownership environment.\n\nNice To Have\nIndustry experience on a post-training or evaluation/benchmarking team (highest priority).\n\nPublications at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL), especially in evaluation or benchmarking.\n\nExperience building or running LLM evaluations, benchmarks, or failure-analysis pipelines.\n\nExperience with synthetic data generation, rubric design, or RL-style workflows that use evals for reward shaping.\n\nWork samples or code (e.g., eval frameworks, benchmark suites, failure-analysis reports or tooling) that demonstrate relevant skills.\n\nBenefits\n$1.5K monthly stipend for meals\n\nFree Equinox membership\n\n$200 monthly laundry reimbursement\n\n$200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement","description_format":"text","description_chars":4271,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Recruiting & Staffing","Freelance & Talent Marketplaces","AI Training Data & Annotation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-28T02:36:45Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":5,"expected_fill_days":65,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early","comp:junior,brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":140000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/mercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/mercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T19:42:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":27631,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":4960},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=4960"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/mercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmercor-research-engineer-intern-benchmarking"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3375492}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"mercor.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3375492},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}