Senior HR Business Partner, Engineering & Product

Mercor•San Francisco, CA

8d•$180,000 - $240,000•Onsite

About The Position

Mercor is seeking a Senior HR Business Partner to support its Delivery organization. This role is central to how Mercor transforms customer demand into high-quality human data. The Delivery teams are responsible for rapidly launching and scaling accounts, managing evolving customer requirements, developing operators into leadership roles, and making critical decisions regarding talent, performance, and organizational structure. The ideal candidate will possess a deep understanding of this dynamic environment, working directly with Delivery leaders and managers to address people-related decisions that impact account and organizational performance. This includes identifying critical talent, developing operators, addressing management challenges, structuring teams, identifying growth opportunities, and ensuring performance standards are met. The role requires a hands-on approach, with the expectation that the HRBP will understand the work, customer environment, and economics well enough to challenge leaders and provide practical recommendations. Experience in the human data/AI data industry is a mandatory requirement, including familiarity with operating models for businesses delivering human-generated data, expert data, model evaluations, RLHF, or data annotation services to AI customers.

Requirements

Human data industry experience is required, including work within companies delivering human data or expertise for AI systems (e.g., AI training data, expert data, RLHF, model evaluation, data annotation/labeling, or similar human data operations). Understanding of how these businesses operate is essential.
8+ years of strong HRBP experience, serving as the primary People partner to senior leaders and independently managing complex organizational and talent decisions.
Experience supporting operations or delivery organizations where performance is closely tied to customers, quality, speed, capacity, and execution.
Experience in a high-growth startup environment, comfortable with rapid organizational change, incomplete systems, ambiguous ownership, and significant business evolution.
Strong business judgment, with the ability to understand operational dynamics, differentiate symptoms from root causes, and formulate clear recommendations.
High performance orientation, comfortable differentiating performance, investing in exceptional people, and directly addressing weak performance.
Excellent manager coaching skills, capable of improving manager effectiveness and challenging experienced leaders when their management approach contributes to problems.
Strong talent instinct, able to recognize individuals with high potential, understand potential attrition drivers, and help create growth opportunities.
Proven ability as a '0 to 1' builder, having created useful talent, manager, or organizational practices with limited prior infrastructure.
Operator mindset, ensuring solutions are practical and effective by staying close to the work, not just identifying problems or writing recommendations.
Direct and low-ego communication style, handling disagreement effectively and prioritizing the best outcome over personal ideas.
Ability to work in the San Francisco office five days a week.

Responsibilities

Partner directly with Delivery leadership to advise on talent, organization design, management, performance, and workforce decisions during organizational scaling.
Gain deep insight into accounts to understand team, customer, and work variations, ensuring people recommendations are grounded in business realities rather than generic HR models.
Elevate the performance bar by helping managers differentiate exceptional performance from strong performance and performance below expectations, ensuring decisions are evidence-based and promptly addressed.
Develop strong operators by identifying high-performing individuals early and collaborating with leaders to create meaningful growth opportunities through larger accounts, expanded scope, new challenges, internal mobility, or management roles.
Strengthen managers by coaching them on feedback, expectations, team effectiveness, difficult conversations, performance issues, and leadership behaviors, and by providing direct challenge when necessary.
Enhance retention of top talent by proactively identifying retention risks, understanding drivers (scope, compensation, manager quality, account experience, career progression, market pull), and collaborating with leaders on interventions.
Shape the evolving organization by partnering on role clarity, organization design, succession planning, spans and layers, leadership changes, and talent movement between teams and accounts.
Apply a people-centric approach to staffing and workload, identifying when persistent workload, account design, insufficient capacity, or operational friction creates talent problems, and working with leadership to address root causes.
Effectively manage difficult people situations, supporting leaders through performance concerns, conduct issues, organizational changes, role changes, and exits with speed, consistency, and sound judgment.
Execute talent and performance mechanisms for Delivery, adapting company-wide approaches for a fast-paced operating organization without creating unnecessary process.
Identify patterns in talent, performance, retention, and employee signals to inform Delivery leadership about changes and areas requiring intervention.
Build new mechanisms, manager tools, or talent practices as needed, comfortable creating initial versions and iterating based on usage, reflecting Mercor's early-stage environment.