Mercor Hiring Competitive Programming Specialist - India | $14-$21 per hour

Mercor is Hiring: Competitive Programming Specialist

• 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 develop 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 (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 in terminal-based environments.
• Can design problems testing 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 their ability to solve real-world programming tasks.
• Enjoy creating reproducible, progressive challenges and abstracting real-world problems into code puzzles.

Primary Goal of This Role

• Create terminal bench–style problems and tasks challenging autonomous agents to solve competitive programming problems in a live, terminal-driven environment.
• Test agent performance across domains like graph theory, dynamic programming, greedy techniques, and real-time debugging to benchmark reasoning, adaptability, and correctness.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement terminal-based coding challenges for agents to solve autonomously.
• Build a sandboxed, judge-like environment for test case execution, correctness checks, and resource monitoring.
• Simulate competitive conditions: time limits, incremental hints, multiple submissions.
• Collaborate with AI engineers to define reward functions, failure conditions, and difficulty tiers.
• Develop tools for benchmark resets, output validation, and scenario generation.
• Evolve problem difficulty from beginner-level syntax to advanced algorithmic pipelines and simulations.

Why This Role Is Exciting

• Define a new generation of programming benchmarks specifically for AI agents.
• Blend algorithmic design, problem-solving, and systems-level realism in one role.
• Work on uncharted challenges pushing the boundaries of agent understanding and execution.

Pay & Work Structure

• Hourly contractor role with Mercor, paid weekly via Stripe Connect.
• Part-time (20 hrs/week), fully remote with async flexibility — work from anywhere, anytime.