Engineering & Software Domain Expert

What you'll do

This is the in-person counterpart to Mercor's remote software evaluation contracts. You sit with a leading AI lab's research and programme teams, on the lab's own tools and equipment, and define what "correct" looks like for engineering work.

Four strands:

• Data QA and review: catching missing behaviours, thin reasoning, code that runs but is subtly wrong, unhandled edge cases, and answers that would not survive a real code review
• Instruction specs and golden datasets: writing specs, golden solutions and new tasks that reflect how engineering is done in practice
• Benchmarks: designing hard evaluation sets and helping build engineering-specific skills and tools with the researchers
• Calibration: agreeing standards with researchers and adjacent specialists, making tacit judgment explicit

The lab wants a specialist. Named examples of acceptable specialisms: distributed systems and backend infrastructure, security and cryptography, embedded and firmware, ML systems, developer tooling and platform engineering, and quality and test engineering.

Who qualifies

• A bachelor's or higher in CS, software engineering or a close discipline; an MS or PhD is strongly preferred
• 4+ years building and shipping production software or engineered systems at a reputable organisation (internships and coursework do not count)
• Genuine specialisation in at least one area above
• Progression to Senior, Staff, Principal, Architect or Engineering Lead with real design ownership
• A visible record (shipped systems, patents, open source, publications) is preferred
• Hands-on professional use of LLMs and the judgment to spot a well-argued wrong answer
• 40 hours a week for an initial 6 months
• Living in the Bay Area, or willing to relocate at your own cost

Location and commitment

This is not remote. You must live in the Bay Area and work on-site with the client team multiple days a week when required. Relocation is at your own expense, with no assistance. Six months full-time is the initial term.

What it pays

$65–105 per hour, W-2 through Cincinnatus LLC, which handles payroll and benefits. The ad publishes no payment schedule. Note that at the bottom of the band, $65 an hour is low for a Staff-level Bay Area engineer; the top of the band is more realistic for the seniority asked for.

Worth knowing

Good:

• W-2 with benefits and a six-month initial term
• Direct, in-person work with frontier-lab researchers
• Broad range of specialisms accepted

Less good:

• Bay Area residence required; relocation unpaid
• The $40 band is wide and the placement criteria are not stated
• Full-time and exclusive of a regular job
• The lab is not named

About this listing

Posted on Mercor's platform, read on 24 September 2026. Employment, onboarding, payroll and benefits run through Cincinnatus LLC, separate from Mercor. Pay, location rules and qualifications are from the ad. See Mercor.