Product Operations Manager, Research Services

Own operational delivery for Mercor’s research partnerships, including benchmark prioritization, evaluation and post-training engagements, vendor capacity, budgets, and customer delivery. The role requires technical fluency in LLM evaluation and post-training, plus strong cross-functional execution and communication.

About the job

Responsibilities

Own intake and prioritization of new benchmarks and evaluations, balancing customer demand, capability gaps, differentiation, and build cost.
Run and share leaderboard evaluations to support research brand equity during new model releases.
Manage inference providers, compute partners, and external training vendors, including capacity forecasting, SLA and rate-card negotiation, cost monitoring, and partner qualification.
Track active evaluations, loss analyses, and post-training engagements, including scope, milestones, dependencies, and SLA status.
Lead delivery reviews, escalate risks, and communicate status to research counterparts.
Translate delivery friction into product requirements and partner with Engineering to automate operational workflows.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in Product Operations, Product Management, Technical Program Management, Research Operations, Solutions Engineering, or a similar technical customer-facing role.
Experience in an ML research or AI infrastructure environment is strongly preferred.
Fluency in modern LLM evaluation, including harness design, verification, agentic rollouts, contamination, and fairness considerations.
Working knowledge of post-training methods, including SFT, preference ranking, and RL, as well as inference economics.
Familiarity with coding agents and comfort using SQL and Python without agent assistance.
Ability to plan capacity against uncertain demand, manage SLAs, and balance cost and reliability.
Strong ownership, communication, project management, and cross-functional coordination skills.
Ability to communicate effectively with AI researchers and executives.

Benefits

Bi-annual performance bonus structure.
Generous equity grant vested over 4 years.
Up to $15,000 relocation bonus.
$10,000 housing bonus for employees living within 0.5 miles of the office.
$1,500 monthly meal stipend.
Free Equinox membership.
$200 monthly laundry reimbursement.
$200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement.
Health, dental, and vision insurance.

Skills

Llm Evaluation, SQL, Python, Sft, Preference Ranking, Reinforcement Learning, Inference Economics, Agentic Rollouts, Benchmarking, Sla Management, Capacity Planning, Project Management, Cross-Functional Coordination, AI Infrastructure