Engineering Manager, Applied AI
Leads engineering teams building AI evaluation infrastructure, annotation products, and multimodal systems to improve frontier model quality. Partners with product, research, and AI labs while managing 6-10 engineers, owning technical direction, and scaling high-performing teams.
About the job
What You’ll Work On
Build and scale teams
- Manage and grow a team of 6–10 engineers
- Coach and develop high-potential engineers
- Establish strong ownership, culture, and execution standards
- Shape the team: define hiring processes, establish engineering practices, and scale a high-performing team from the ground up
Drive Applied AI systems and outcomes
- Drive insights and methodology behind evaluation systems that benchmark and improve model performance
- Lead development while driving improvements in data quality, operational efficiency, system stability, and scalability
- Scale products that generate high-quality training data and improve human-in-the-loop workflows
Own technical direction
- Lead system design for complex AI systems
- Stay close to the technical work and guide engineers through ambiguous problems
- Translate high-level AI goals into clear engineering roadmaps and execution plans
Operate across a broad scope
- Partner with product, research, operations, and external AI labs
- Work across systems, data insights, and custom partnerships to drive model quality
Shape the organization
- Introduce lightweight processes as the organization scales
- Hire and develop strong engineering talent
- Help define engineering management at Mercor
What We’re Looking For
- 6–10 years in engineering; 2–3+ years managing teams
- Strong background in building scalable systems
- Ability to lead in ambiguous environments with sound technical judgment
- Proven ability to coach engineers and drive execution
- Strong ownership mindset with pragmatic decision-making
Skills
Scalable Systems, System Design, Ai Evaluation, Data Quality, Machine Learning, Engineering Leadership, Team Management, Hiring Processes, Roadmapping, Technical Coaching
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