Product Operations Manager, Research Services

Job description

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 Product Operations Manager, Research Services, you'll drive operational excellence to support Mercor's full-service research partnerships. You will prioritize and manage delivery across various strategic customer segments to support model evaluations, diagnose model capability gaps, and fulfill post-training demand to better support our most strategic customers. This is a highly technical, internally-facing role in the Product Operations job family at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Data Production, GTM, Finance, and Strategic Partnerships. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Prioritize the Benchmark Portfolio: Own the intake and prioritization of new benchmarks and evaluations supported in our platform. Weigh customer demand, observed capability gaps, differentiation versus public benchmarks, and build cost to inform our priorities. - Support Dataset Demand Generation: Run and share leaderboard evals to drive Mercor’s research brand equity during new model releases. - Manage Training and Inference Partners & Budgets: Own the relationships with our inference providers, compute partners, and external training vendors. Forecast capacity against the delivery calendar, negotiate and track SLAs and rate cards, monitor cost per eval run and per rollout, and qualify new partners before we need them. - Track Customer Delivery: Maintain the operating picture across every active evals, loss analysis, and post-training engagements, highlighting scope, milestones, dependencies, and SLA status. Run the delivery review, escalate slipping commitments before the customer notices, and give research counterparts a straight answer on where things stand. - Shape the Product: Translate recurring delivery friction into product requirements for the eval platform and partner with Engineering to automate the workflows you'd otherwise be running by hand. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Experience: 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. - Technical Fluency: Fluent in how modern LLM evaluation works, including harness design, verification, agentic rollouts, and contamination and fairness pitfalls. Working understanding of post-training (SFT, preference ranking, RL) and of inference economics. Familiar with coding agents; comfortable in SQL and Python without agent assistance. - Vendor and Capacity Judgment: Can plan capacity against an uncertain demand curve, hold partners to an SLA, and weigh cost against reliability without needing to escalate every call. - Ownership: Thrive in ambiguous environments and take ownership from problem definition through execution. Comfortable being the person accountable for a date. - Communication: Can hold your own in a technical conversation with AI researchers and write a status update an executive can act on. Excellent written and verbal communication. - Systems Thinking: Strong project management and cross-functional coordination skills. Passion for fixing problems at the source and building repeatable systems rather than one-off solutions. 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