Software Engineer, Robotics — San Francisco

ABOUT MERCOR Mercor'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.   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 Frontier AI is going physical, and the labs building it are bottlenecked on one thing: high-quality data from the real world. Mercor pairs its operational scale with the specialized engineering that physical-world data demands. As a Software Engineer on Robotics, you'll sit between Mercor's data systems and our customers' infrastructure. You'll work alongside operations and product teams to turn a set of requirements into a working delivery pipeline: the schema, fields, format, transport, and quality checks that prove what shipped is what was specified. This is a delivery-focused applied engineering role, not a classic robotics role. You will learn to grow and deeply understand robotics data types and work as part of a critical team leading the frontier development of physical AI, collaborating with engineers and researchers at frontier labs to ensure the data gets delivered properly. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Partner with SPLs and client engineering teams to translate and implement data requirements into concrete delivery pipelines - Build and operate the pipelines that move data from Mercor's systems into customer storage reliably at petabyte scale - Format and transform datasets to per-client specification: MCAP and other container formats, custom schemas, field mappings, metadata, and versioning - Build automated validation to support delivery pipelines - Prototype quickly against new customer requirements, and debug issues when needed - Turn one-off client requests into reusable components, and own delivery infrastructure end to end WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Strong backend and data engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust) and comfort operating production systems on AWS and GCP - Experience building and owning high-volume data pipelines, not just contributing to them - Experience with large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, and object storage economics - Customer-facing instincts: you can lead a technical conversation, ask the right questions, and push back when a request is unreasonable - Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively with a product team, where requirements evolve with the customers and data types NICE TO HAVE - Experience with robotics/AV data formats and tooling such as MCAP, ROS, protobuf, Foxglove - Prior work on data engines, pipelines, or delivery for multimodal data - Multi-sensor data experience across video, depth, inertial, and audio, including calibration and synchronization - Forward-deployed, solutions, or delivery engineering experience at a data or infrastructure company - Computer vision or multimodal ML exposure: detection, tracking, or VLM-based labeling and QC 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