Software Engineer, Robotics Data

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. You'll build the data backbone of physical AI: the pipelines that take raw multi-sensor capture from the field (video, depth, inertial, audio, and more) and turn it into validated, privacy-safe, delivery-ready datasets for frontier labs. Ingest, segmentation, pre-labeling, automated QC, and packaging, at petabyte scale across thousands of concurrent collectors.

Responsibilities

Build the end-to-end sensor data pipeline: ingest from capture devices in the field, through segmentation, pre-labeling, QC, and packaged delivery to customers; Design automated QC that validates recordings at scale: timing and sync integrity, calibration health, sensor continuity, coverage against requirements; Establish dataset schemas, versioning, provenance, and versioning, so every delivery has a clear system traceability; Build shared processing components such as privacy redaction, transcription, encoding, format packaging across all offerings; Integrate VLM-assisted pre-labeling and quality scoring into production workflows without sacrificing debuggability or human oversight

Requirements

Strong production backend/data engineering experience — you've built and owned high-volume data pipelines; Experience processing video or sensor data at scale: large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, object storage economics; Fluency in Python and comfortable with AWS; Genuine data taste: you can look at a sensor trace or a timing histogram and tell when something is off; Comfort in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces where requirements evolve with the customer

Nice to have

Experience with robotics data formats and tooling (MCAP, ROS bags, protobuf, Foxglove), camera geometry, or multi-sensor calibration and synchronization; Computer vision or multimodal ML experience (detection, tracking, VLM-based labeling or QC); Prior work on data engines for AV, robotics, or egocentric video

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