Machine Learning Engineer, Marketplace

About the role

This role sits on a core decision layer of the product. Your work will directly shape how talent is discovered, matched, and hired, and will influence fundamental marketplace outcomes across quality, speed, and revenue.

Responsibilities

• Build the models and decision systems that power Mercor's hiring engine, including search and ranking, candidate-job matching, marketplace recommendations, personalization, and allocation decisions.
• Work on problems shaped by real marketplace constraints: sparse and delayed labels, cold start, noisy feedback, heterogeneous supply and demand, and the need to optimize across speed, quality, and conversion simultaneously.
• Improve candidate-job matching using embeddings, structured attributes, and behavioral signals.
• Optimize ranking toward long-term hiring outcomes under delayed and incomplete labels.
• Design models that balance marketplace objectives such as fill rate, quality, speed, and conversion.
• Build systems for candidate allocation, opportunity routing, and liquidity optimization.
• Develop evaluation and experimentation frameworks that connect model performance to business results.

Requirements

Strong track record of shipping ML systems into production.

Experience with ranking, recommendation, search, matching, or marketplace problems.

Good judgment on model design, objective functions, evaluation, and tradeoffs.

Comfort working across the full applied ML stack: data, features, training, inference, and iteration.

Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward simple, robust systems.

Qualifications

PhD or MS in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Math, or related field.

At least 5 years of relevant work experience in machine learning, data science, or a related field.

Experience with large-scale distributed systems, databases, and cloud infrastructure.

Skills

• Python, Go
• Embeddings, fine-tuning
• RAG
• Kafka, Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Terraform

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

Pay

Compensation Range: $130K - $500K

Schedule

Work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.