What the work involves

This is not a survey-filling exercise or a data-labeling queue. Mercor is a Series C company at a $10B valuation, scaling past roughly 500 full-time employees alongside a large global contractor network, and essentially nothing about total rewards is settled: no fixed compensation philosophy, no agreed leveling map across functions that look nothing alike, no established grant guidelines or refresh cadence. You are brought in to work one of those open questions with the People team — how salary bands should be structured across engineering, GTM and operations; how to size and pace an option pool; how to explain equity value to candidates who have never held it before; whether a peer set holds up under exec scrutiny.

Engagements run a few hours at a time and are scoped to a single question. Expect to arrive with an opinion, defend it against pushback from people who will actually have to live with the decision, and be specific about what you did before rather than what the literature says.

What the platform screens for

Mercor screens on two areas and states that depth in either one alone is sufficient:

  • Compensation design & architecture — bands, leveling frameworks and job architecture built from scratch; ownership of a full annual cycle including merit, promotions, bonus and equity refresh; benchmarking you had to defend to a skeptical executive team; incentive design that measurably changed behavior.
  • Equity program management — option and RSU program design, grant guidelines, pool planning, vesting and refresh philosophy; 409A valuations, plan governance and grant administration at a venture-backed company; the modeling and communication that makes equity legible to candidates and employees.

Everything else — pay equity and transparency, global and contractor comp, benefits, HRIS and comp tooling, executive comp, IPO readiness — is described as valuable but not required. The screen rewards concrete ownership: numbers, headcounts, the decision you made and what it cost. Secondhand exposure to a program someone else designed reads clearly as secondhand.

Logistics and pay

Application begins with a short AI-led screen. If your background fits, you're invited to a paid conversation about a live question the company is currently facing, and you are paid for that conversation regardless of whether further work follows. Observed rate is $50–$200/hr, banded by depth of experience — not guaranteed, and the top of the band reflects people who have owned these programs end to end at venture-backed scale. Work is remote and scheduled around a specific question rather than a standing weekly commitment. Mercor states it reviews every submission.