> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Software Engineer, Automation

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ccafc6f0ecf62c0a

Mercor posts a FDE role to build for teams inside the company in San Francisco, CA and 1 more, at $160,000–$500,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Build production agentic systems that automate Mercor’s internal operations and eventually support customer operations at scale. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

- [Mercor](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/mercor)

Posted Mar 12, 2026 by Mercor · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$160,000–$500,000** San Francisco, CA +1 On-site Full-time

Build production agentic systems that automate Mercor’s internal operations and eventually support customer operations at scale.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fccafc6f0ecf62c0a&placement=top)
- [View posting at Mercor](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/dd4f59a1-d077-4c20-8333-9a7706210e99/application)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$160K–$500K Above the median

Midpoint $330K · median $190K

This job $160K to $500K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

### The work

Builds for teams inside the company

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales (not covered)
2. Proof of concept (not covered)
3. Implementation
4. Operations

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: Both

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now?

The job is in San Francisco, CA · New York, NY. Could you work in one of these?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: San Francisco, CA · New York, NY

- **Work arrangement**: On-site

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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## The job description from Mercor

Posted by Mercor on Mar 12, 2026

### About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.

Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.

### About the Role

As a Software Engineer on the Automations team at Mercor, you’ll join a small, high-leverage engineering group building the autonomous systems that run Mercor’s internal operations — and eventually, operations at scale for the companies we serve.

This is not a research role. You’ll design and ship production agents that take real actions: scheduling interventions, executing operational playbooks, managing talent pipelines, and surfacing decisions that previously required hours of manual click-ops. From day one, you’ll own systems end-to-end — from MCP server design to evaluation frameworks — working directly with operators and platform engineers to turn repeatable human workflows into reliable, autonomous ones.

You’ll reason about correctness, rollback, observability, and trust in systems that touch payments, contracts, and people’s livelihoods. This is greenfield agentic infrastructure with immediate real-world impact.

### What You’ll Do

- Build and maintain MCP servers that give agents structured access to Mercor’s platform reading project state, taking management actions, and triggering communications.
- Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure agent decision quality and drive continuous improvement through feedback loops.
- Develop action queues and playbook orchestration systems that allow agents to execute multi-step workflows with conditional logic.
- Instrument agent systems end-to-end — capturing outcomes, closing feedback loops, and enabling hill-climbing on eval metrics.
- Collaborate directly with operators to identify high-leverage automation opportunities and translate them into robust agent behaviors.
- Debug and harden agent systems in production, designing for reliability at scale.
- Contribute to foundational patterns and infrastructure that the rest of the company will build on.

### What We’re Looking For

- Strong backend engineering fundamentals in Python (or equivalent modern language).
- Experience building with LLM APIs — including tool use, structured outputs, and multi-step reasoning workflows.
- Comfort designing evaluation frameworks and thinking rigorously about agent failure modes.
- Ability to ship quickly and iterate on systems that interact with the real world.
- Understanding of distributed systems, APIs, and production infrastructure.
- Full-stack experience is a plus — owning features end-to-end will increase your impact.

### Why Mercor

- Impact: Your work powers how the world’s leading AI labs train and test their models.
- Learning: Get early insights into frontier model capabilities months before the market.
- Growth: Work on both infrastructure and research-adjacent projects with fast paths to ownership.

### 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

[View posting at Mercor](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/dd4f59a1-d077-4c20-8333-9a7706210e99/application)

## About Mercor

Marketplace matching domain experts with AI labs and enterprises to produce training data, evaluations, and production AI workflows.

Series C · 200–500 people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
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