Product Operations Manager, Research Services

As a Product Operations Manager, Research Services, you'll drive operational excellence to support Mercor's full-service research partnerships. You will prioritize and manage delivery across various strategic customer segments to support model evaluations, diagnose model capability gaps, and fulfill post-training demand to better support our most strategic customers. This is a highly technical, internally-facing role in the Product Operations job family at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Data Production, GTM, Finance, and Strategic Partnerships.

Responsibilities

Prioritize the Benchmark Portfolio: Own the intake and prioritization of new benchmarks and evaluations supported in our platform; Support Dataset Demand Generation: Run and share leaderboard evals to drive Mercor's research brand equity during new model releases; Manage Training and Inference Partners & Budgets: Own the relationships with our inference providers, compute partners, and external training vendors; Track Customer Delivery: Maintain the operating picture across every active evals, loss analysis, and post-training engagements; Shape the Product: Translate recurring delivery friction into product requirements for the eval platform and partner with Engineering to automate the workflows you'd otherwise be running by hand

Requirements

3+ years in Product Operations, Product Management, Technical Program Management, Research Operations, Solutions Engineering, or a similar technical, customer-facing role; Fluent in how modern LLM evaluation works, including harness design, verification, agentic rollouts, contamination and fairness pitfalls; Working understanding of post-training (SFT, preference ranking, RL) and of inference economics; Familiar with coding agents; Comfortable in SQL and Python without agent assistance; Can plan capacity against an uncertain demand curve, hold partners to an SLA, and weigh cost against reliability; Thrive in ambiguous environments and take ownership from problem definition through execution; Can hold your own in a technical conversation with AI researchers and write a status update an executive can act on; Excellent written and verbal communication; Strong project management and cross-functional coordination skills; Passion for fixing problems at the source and building repeatable systems rather than one-off solutions

Nice to have

Experience operating in an ML research or AI infrastructure environment

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