Tech Lead Manager

Mercor • San Francisco, CA

100d

About The Position

As a Tech Lead Manager at Mercor, you’ll play a dual role: 50% of your time will be spent writing high-quality code and building systems, and the other 50% leading, mentoring, and scaling a high-performing engineering team. You’ll ensure that our core infrastructure and product development keep pace with our rapid growth while fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration. This role is perfect for someone who thrives in high-growth environments, can bring order without adding bureaucracy, and knows how to balance technical depth with clear business alignment. You’ll directly shape the future of Mercor’s engineering organization as we scale.

Requirements

• Strong background in backend engineering (Python/Django or similar) with proven ability to ship in production.
• Experience managing and scaling engineering teams while still contributing as an individual contributor.
• Familiarity with LLM internals, most recent benchmarks, post training is a bonus.
• Direct experience coaching both individual contributors and engineering managers.
• Ability to hire top talent quickly and effectively in distributed team setups.
• Strong communication skills; able to explain technical trade-offs in plain business terms.
• Hyper-growth mindset; thrives in chaos and brings structure without heavy process.
• Above all: a builder-leader hybrid who thrives on both coding and coaching.

Responsibilities

• Writing production-level code and contributing directly to our systems and products (50% of your time).
• Managing and mentoring a team of engineers, driving career growth, and fostering a strong engineering culture.
• Leading technical design, architecture decisions, and code reviews to ensure scalability and reliability.
• Prototyping and scaling new evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, and RL environments.
• Setting engineering guardrails that enable rapid growth without sacrificing stability or code quality.
• Hiring and onboarding top-tier technical talent quickly, including across geographies.
• Coordinating cross-functional projects with product, operations, and data teams to deliver high-impact outcomes.
• Translating technical strategy into business outcomes; aligning engineering decisions with marketplace P&L levers.
• Identifying and addressing bottlenecks in engineering processes as we scale rapidly.

Benefits

• Impact: Your work powers how the world’s leading AI labs train and test their models.
• Learning: Get early insights into frontier model capabilities months before the market.
• Growth: Work on both infrastructure and research-adjacent projects with fast paths to ownership.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager