Competitive Programming Specialist at Mercor

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Role Description

This role involves creating 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.

• Develop interactive, terminal-based challenges that test the problem-solving capabilities of autonomous agents in real-time coding scenarios.

Qualifications

• Track record of success in competitive programming contests (e.g., ICPC, Codeforces, LeetCode, AtCoder, HackerRank)
• Strong skills in algorithms, data structures, and systems-level thinking
• Proficient in Python, C++, or Go, and comfortable working in terminal-based coding environments
• Ability to design programming problems that test time complexity, memory constraints, logic correctness, and multi-step reasoning
• Experience with online judge systems, sandboxed environments, or contest infrastructure
• Curiosity about AI agents and interest 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

Requirements

• Create terminal bench–style problems and tasks where autonomous agents are challenged to solve competitive programming problems in a live, terminal-driven environment
• Test agent performance across algorithmic domains — such as graph theory, dynamic programming, greedy techniques, and real-time debugging

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

• 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