Software Engineer (Site Reliability Engineer)

Site Reliability Engineer — Production Systems Expert

Mercor is seeking experienced Site Reliability Engineers with deep expertise in production incident response, on-call operations, and infrastructure reliability. In this role, you will apply your real-world experience managing high-availability systems to help evaluate and train AI models that aim to reason about system failures, observability, and operational best practices.

You will author and review complex, realistic scenarios grounded in production incidents, covering root cause analysis, monitoring and alerting, capacity planning, and post-incident remediation. These tasks will be used to assess how well AI systems can diagnose and resolve infrastructure-level problems.

You are a good fit if you:

• Have 3+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or production engineering at big tech company or leading startup

• Have served in on-call rotations managing Tier 1/Tier 2 production services with meaningful SLA requirements

• Have hands-on experience with incident response and post-mortem processes, including structured RCA (root cause analysis)

• Are proficient with observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, PagerDuty, or equivalent

• Have deep knowledge of Linux systems, networking (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing), and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)

• Have experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipelines

• Have strong debugging skills across the stack (application-level tracing to kernel-level diagnostics)

• Are currently based in the United States

Role Start Date

• This role is actively onboarding new participants in early May, with the project preparing to scale beyond the initial pilot.

• The project is currently in a pilot phase with plans to ramp into production. Participants are expected to be highly engaged with project leadership.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

Contract and Payment Terms

• You will be engaged as an independent contractor.
• This is a fully remote role that can be completed on your own schedule.
• Projects can be extended, shortened, or concluded early depending on needs and performance.
• Your work at Mercor will not involve access to confidential or proprietary information from any employer, client, or institution.
• Payments are weekly on Stripe or Wise based on services rendered.
• Please note: We are unable to support H1-B or STEM OPT candidates at this time.

About Mercor

Mercor partners with leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. You will work on projects that focus on training and enhancing AI systems. You will be paid competitively, collaborate with leading researchers, and help shape the next generation of AI systems in your area of expertise.