About Mercor 

Mercor Recruitment

Job Role: Competitive Programming Specialist

Qualification: Bachelors / Masters Degree

Experience: Any

Batch: 2025 / 2024 / 2023 / 2022

Salary: $14-$21 per hour

Job Location: Remote

Last Date: ASAP

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About the role

Mercor is hiring a Competitive Programming Specialist to create terminal bench–style problems and tasks involving agents within a competitive programming environment, as part of a hiring effort for its AI lab partner building advanced agent-based infrastructure. This role is ideal for coders with a strong background in algorithmic thinking, problem design, and hands-on experience with competitive programming platforms. You’ll be developing interactive, terminal-based challenges that test the problem-solving capabilities of autonomous agents in real-time coding scenarios.

You’re a great fit if you:

• Have a track record of success in competitive programming contests (e.g., ICPC, Codeforces, LeetCode, AtCoder, HackerRank).

• Possess strong skills in algorithms, data structures, and systems-level thinking.

• Are proficient in Python, C++, or Go, and comfortable working in terminal-based coding environments.

• Can design programming problems that test time complexity, memory constraints, logic correctness, and multi-step reasoning.

• Have experience with online judge systems, sandboxed environments, or contest infrastructure.

• Are curious about AI agents and interested in how agents can solve real-world programming tasks.

• Enjoy creating reproducible, progressive challenges and can abstract real-world systems problems into code-based puzzles.

Primary Goal of This Role

To create terminal bench–style problems and tasks where autonomous agents are challenged to solve competitive programming problems in a live, terminal-driven environment. These tasks will test agent performance across algorithmic domains — such as graph theory, dynamic programming, greedy techniques, and real-time debugging — and serve as a benchmark for reasoning, adaptability, and correctness under constraints.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement terminal-based coding challenges for agents to solve autonomously.

• Build a sandboxed, judge-like environment that runs test cases, checks correctness, and monitors time/memory usage.

• Simulate real-world competitive conditions: limited time, incremental hints, multiple submissions, etc.

• Collaborate with AI engineers to define reward functions, failure conditions, and difficulty tiers.

• Develop tooling for benchmark resets, output validation, and scenario generation.

• Evolve the difficulty of problems from beginner-level syntax and logic to advanced algorithmic pipelines and systems simulations.

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Define a new generation of programming benchmarks built specifically for AI agents.

• Blend algorithmic design, problem solving, and systems-level realism in one role.

• Work on uncharted challenges that push the boundaries of what agents can understand and execute.

Pay & Work Structure

• You’ll be classified as an hourly contractor to Mercor.

• Paid weekly via Stripe Connect, based on hours logged.

• Part-time (20 hrs/week) with fully remote, async flexibility — work from anywhere, on your own schedule.

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.