About
the Role You’ll work on security across a platform that processes large volumes of sensitive data, including AI training pipelines, expert payments, and enterprise integrations. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building and improving the systems that keep Mercor secure. We use AI heavily in our own security work. You should be comfortable building alongside AI code-gen tools, using LLMs to accelerate threat analysis, and automating away the repetitive work that slows security teams down. If you're the kind of engineer who writes a script instead of filing a ticket, you'll fit in here. We're in-person five days a week at our San Francisco headquarters, with first Fridays remote. New York could be an option for the right candidate. What You'll Build: Detection and response pipelines that catch real threats, not checkbox alerts Security automation that replaces manual processes - if you're doing something twice, automate it Infrastructure hardening across AWS, Kubernetes, and our production environment Identity and access controls for a platform serving 300K+ experts and enterprise clients Application security tooling integrated into CI/CD - shifting security left without slowing down deploys Incident response runbooks and tooling - when something breaks, you'll own the fix end-to-end
What We're Looking For You've built security tooling or automation in a previous role - not just operated existing tools Strong in Python, Go, or TypeScript - you ship code, not slide decks Experience hardening cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) - VPCs, IAM, container security You understand application security at the code level - can review a PR for auth bugs, not just run a scanner Comfortable with detection engineering - writing rules, tuning alerts, reducing noise You've done incident response and know what it means to be on-call when things break 5+ years of professional experience in security engineering, software engineering, or a related builder role
Bonus Points Experience at a high-growth startup or fast-moving engineering org Familiarity with AI/ML security - model access controls, training data protection, prompt injection Offensive security skills - pen testing, bug bounty, red team experience Contributions to open source security tools You've built something from scratch that a team still uses Why Mercor Build, don't babysit. We automate the boring stuff. You'll spend your time building systems, not reviewing access requests. AI-native security. You'll use frontier AI tools daily - for code review, threat analysis, detection writing, and anything that
benefits from an AI co-pilot. Ownership from day one. You'll own meaningful security surface area, not a single dashboard. See the future early. Working alongside AI labs means you'll understand frontier model capabilities months before the market.
Benefits Equity ownership in a high-growth, profitable company Relocation support to San Francisco, NYC, or London as needed Housing support near our SF office Daily meal stipend Premium fitness membership at Equinox Comprehensive health insurance
Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.