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Mercor is an AI data company on a mission to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. The platform connects millions of domain experts who are paid to train frontier AI models, and Mercor Enterprise brings this infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies. As Staff Software Engineer for Code Search & Retrieval, you will own the end-to-end architecture and algorithms for searching across code tasks on the platform.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on building retrieval systems that understand code at a semantic and structural level—far beyond generic text matching. You'll design hybrid retrieval systems combining dense code embeddings and lexical (BM25) signals, optimize for speed and cost at scale, and continuously evolve search quality as new state-of-the-art code models arrive.
Key responsibilities include: architecting the code search and retrieval pipeline (dense embeddings, candidate generation, ranking, re-ranking); solving the hard problem of identifying similar code tasks by structure, semantics, intent, and difficulty; building systems to select and route tasks to the correct code-specific models; designing natural-language-to-query translation; operating the indexing pipeline for freshness and consistency; making cost-speed tradeoffs for fast, economical search; building evaluation harnesses for continuous improvement; defining long-term technical strategy; establishing metrics and quality guardrails; staying hands-on with prototyping and production code; mentoring engineers across levels; and partnering with product, research, and leadership on platform investments.
You'll work alongside researchers and operators at the forefront of AI advancement. The company is a profitable Series C valued at $10 billion, with in-person work five days a week in San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
