Software Engineer, Robotics

Software Engineer on Robotics 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.

As a Software Engineer on Robotics, you'll sit between Mercor's data systems and our customers' infrastructure. You'll work alongside operations and product teams to turn a set of requirements into a working delivery pipeline: the schema, fields, format, transport, and quality checks that prove what shipped is what was specified.

This is a delivery-focused applied engineering role, not a classic robotics role. You will learn to grow and deeply understand robotics data types and work as part of a critical team leading the frontier development of physical AI, collaborating with engineers and researchers at frontier labs to ensure the data gets delivered properly.

What You'll Do Partner with SPLs and client engineering teams to translate and implement data requirements into concrete delivery pipelines

Build and operate the pipelines that move data from Mercor's systems into customer storage reliably at petabyte scale

Format and transform datasets to per-client specification: MCAP and other container formats, custom schemas, field mappings, metadata, and versioning

Build automated validation to support delivery pipelines

Prototype quickly against new customer requirements, and debug issues when needed

Turn one-off client requests into reusable components, and own delivery infrastructure end to end

What We're Looking For Strong backend and data engineering fundamentals in a modern language (Python, Go, Rust) and comfort operating production systems on AWS and GCP

Experience building and owning high-volume data pipelines, not just contributing to them

Experience with large binary formats, streaming ingestion, distributed batch processing, and object storage economics

Customer-facing instincts: you can lead a technical conversation, ask the right questions, and push back when a request is unreasonable

Comfort working through ambiguity and shipping iteratively with a product team, where requirements evolve with the customers and data types

Nice to Have Experience with robotics/AV data formats and tooling such as MCAP, ROS, protobuf, Foxglove

Prior work on data engines, pipelines, or delivery for multimodal data

Multi-sensor data experience across video, depth, inertial, and audio, including calibration and synchronization

Forward-deployed, solutions, or delivery engineering experience at a data or infrastructure company

Computer vision or multimodal ML exposure: detection, tracking, or VLM-based labeling and QC

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