About the RoleFrontier 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
