Senior Data Engineer – Remote Contract (up to $125/hr)

About the role

Mercor is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design and maintain high‑performance data pipelines for AI research labs. This remote contract position offers a competitive hourly rate and the flexibility to work independently on complex evaluation scenarios.

Key responsibilities

• Build long‑horizon pipeline tasks with deterministic rubrics to grade agent performance against verifiable ground truth.
• Develop ETL/ELT pipelines and dbt models that generate output tables with incremental logic and watermark behavior.
• Create Airflow, Dagster or Prefect DAGs that pass comprehensive test suites and data‑quality checks.
• Design warehouse schemas that meet defined contracts, performance targets, and query‑time budgets.
• Work in focused, independent sessions to craft challenging evaluation scenarios for AI agents.
• Ensure all tasks have objective, checkable answers without subjective judgment.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Minimum 3 years of experience in data engineering or analytics engineering.
• Strong written communication skills for encoding deterministic rubrics.

Required skills

• dbt model development
• Pipeline orchestration tools: Airflow, Dagster, Prefect
• Data‑warehouse platforms: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks
• Design of data contracts, schema documentation, and test suites

What we offer

• Hourly compensation ranging from $90 to $125
• Fully remote work arrangement
• Contract‑based engagement with potential for increased responsibility based on performance