Mercor
Applied Machine Learning Engineer, Economist
About this role
Mercor seeks an economist to design and optimize the core mechanisms of a two-sided talent marketplace, applying economic theory and causal inference to pricing, incentives, matching, and allocation. You'll partner with ML and engineering teams to translate marketplace insights into production systems that drive matching efficiency, earnings, and platform revenue.
What you'll do
- Design pricing mechanisms, incentive structures, and allocation rules to balance supply and demand while maintaining quality and margins
- Conduct causal analysis of marketplace health metrics including liquidity, match quality, fill rate, time-to-hire, and earnings
- Design and execute A/B tests and marketplace experiments to evaluate interventions while accounting for network interference effects
- Build forecasting models for supply, demand, and capacity across the talent network to inform sourcing and planning decisions
- Define objective functions and guardrail metrics that marketplace systems optimize toward in collaboration with product and ML teams
- Identify and quantify marketplace failure modes such as cold start, congestion, thinness, and supply/demand imbalances
What they're looking for
- Microeconomics and market design theory
- Causal inference and experimental design (including network/marketplace experiments)
- SQL and Python or R for end-to-end data analysis
- Forecasting and time series modeling
- A/B testing and statistical analysis
- Data visualization and communication to technical and business audiences
- Mechanism design and incentive structure optimization
- Familiarity with two-sided marketplace platforms
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus
- Generous equity grant vesting over 4 years
- Up to $15,000 relocation bonus
- $10,000 housing bonus (within 0.5 miles of office)
- $1,500 monthly meal stipend
- Free Equinox membership, $200 monthly laundry reimbursement, $200 monthly wellness reimbursement
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Mercor
Mercor builds a marketplace platform connecting expert talent to AI opportunities, supported by identity infrastructure, matching algorithms, and internal tools for data management. The company is hiring Software Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, Fullstack Engineers, and Security Engineers to develop backend systems, ML models, cloud infrastructure, and distributed platforms.
- Website
- mercor.io
Likely interview questions
- Describe a marketplace or two-sided platform you've analyzed or optimized—what metrics did you focus on and what trade-offs did you navigate?
- Walk us through how you've designed an experiment to measure causal impact when treatment effects interfere across market participants.