Product Operations Manager, Research Services

Mercor is hiring a Product Operations Manager, Research Services to lead end-to-end operations for research partnerships and evaluation platform workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own intake and prioritization for new benchmarks and evaluations supported in the platform
• Use customer demand, observed capability gaps, differentiation versus public benchmarks, and build cost to set priorities
• Run and share leaderboard evals to support Mercor’s research brand equity during new model releases
• Manage relationships with inference providers, compute partners, and external training vendors
• Forecast capacity against the delivery calendar
• Negotiate, track, and maintain SLAs and rate cards
• Monitor cost per eval run and cost per rollout
• Qualify new partners ahead of future demand needs
• Maintain an operating picture across active evals, loss analysis, and post-training engagements
• Surface scope, milestones, dependencies, and SLA status for delivery visibility
• Run delivery reviews and escalate commitments that are slipping before customers notice
• Convert recurring delivery friction into product requirements for the eval platform
• Partner with Engineering to automate workflows that would otherwise be handled manually

Requirements

• 3+ years in Product Operations, Product Management, Technical Program Management, Research Operations, Solutions Engineering, or a similar technical, customer-facing role
• Experience operating in an ML research or AI infrastructure environment (strongly preferred)
• Fluency in modern LLM evaluation, including harness design, verification, agentic rollouts, and contamination and fairness pitfalls
• Working understanding of post-training (SFT, preference ranking, RL) and inference economics
• Familiarity with coding agents; comfortable coding in SQL and Python without agent assistance
• Ability to plan capacity against an uncertain demand curve
• Ability to hold partners to SLAs and weigh cost against reliability without escalating every call
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership from problem definition through execution, including accountability for dates
• Strong technical communication: lead technical conversations with AI researchers and write status updates an executive can act on
• Strong written and verbal communication
• Project management and cross-functional coordination skills
• Motivation to fix issues at the source and build repeatable systems instead of one-off solutions

Technologies

• SQL
• Python
• SFT
• RL

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 the office)
• $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
• Free Equinox membership
• $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
• $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
• Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Location: San Francisco, CA (onsite)

Salary: USD 140,000 - 210,000 per year

Experience: 3+ years