What are the responsibilities and job description for the Strategic Sourcing & Procurement position at Mercor?
About Mercor
Mercor is defining the future of work. We partner with leading AI labs and enterprises to provide the human intelligence essential to AI development. Our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers teach students: by sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can't be captured in code alone. Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $2 million a day.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
This is a foundational hire: Mercor’s first Strategic Sourcer. You’ll own how we source and manage vendors across the full stack — standard SaaS, LLM API agreements, AWS compute, and technical contracts with reinforcement learning-as-a-service providers like Applied Compute. You’ll build this function from scratch with direct impact on Mercor’s unit economics.
The ideal candidate combines procurement expertise with technical fluency — you can run an RFP and negotiate an enterprise deal, but you also understand token economics, cloud pricing structures, and how ML teams actually build. You have an AI-first mindset and are energized by zero-to-one environments.
What You’ll Do
Software & SaaS Procurement
Mercor is defining the future of work. We partner with leading AI labs and enterprises to provide the human intelligence essential to AI development. Our vast talent network trains frontier AI models in the same way teachers teach students: by sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can't be captured in code alone. Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $2 million a day.
Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
This is a foundational hire: Mercor’s first Strategic Sourcer. You’ll own how we source and manage vendors across the full stack — standard SaaS, LLM API agreements, AWS compute, and technical contracts with reinforcement learning-as-a-service providers like Applied Compute. You’ll build this function from scratch with direct impact on Mercor’s unit economics.
The ideal candidate combines procurement expertise with technical fluency — you can run an RFP and negotiate an enterprise deal, but you also understand token economics, cloud pricing structures, and how ML teams actually build. You have an AI-first mindset and are energized by zero-to-one environments.
What You’ll Do
Software & SaaS Procurement
- Own end-to-end sourcing for Mercor’s software and services portfolio — run RFPs, negotiate enterprise contracts (including usage-based and non-standard agreements), and manage vendor renewals
- Champion Procure-to-Pay (P2P) adoption, driving compliance and reducing cycle time through automation and self-service tooling
- Build scalable procurement processes and playbooks without creating bottlenecks
- Own sourcing for Mercor’s AI infrastructure: LLM API agreements (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), token pricing negotiations, and volume commitment structures
- Manage AWS and cloud compute relationships — negotiate EDPs and Reserved Instances, partner with DevInfra on cost allocation and chargeback
- Partner with engineering to evaluate and contract for RL-as-a-service providers — structuring agreements around training run economics, compute SLAs, and data governance
- Serve as a sourcing advisor to technical leadership on commercial risks, vendor options, and data protection requirements
- Build a spend analytics function: track vendor spend, identify savings opportunities through benchmarking and competitive bids, and develop vendor scorecards and renewal calendars
- Define purchasing policies and approval workflows; ensure all procurement activities are audit-ready
- Serve as the primary procurement partner to Finance, Legal, Engineering, and Operations
- 6–8 years in strategic sourcing, procurement, or vendor management at a high-growth tech company
- Track record negotiating complex technology agreements, including usage-based, API-driven, and non-standard contracts
- Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers on cloud architecture, distributed systems, and APIs — you don’t need to write code, but you need to understand how technical teams build
- Experience managing cloud vendor relationships (AWS preferred) and familiarity with EDPs, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans
- Analytical fluency: spend modeling, cost-per-unit economics, strong Excel/SQL skills a plus
- An AI-first mindset and a builder’s instinct — comfortable starting from a blank slate and iterating quickly
- Experience sourcing AI/ML infrastructure, GPU compute, or frontier model API agreements
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning workloads, training infrastructure, or the MLOps vendor landscape
- Background in finance, operations, or consulting in addition to procurement
- Base cash comp from $165K - $225k
- Aggressive bi-annual performance bonus structure
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15k Relocation bonus
- $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Free Equinox membership
- $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
- $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
- Health, Dental, Vision insurance
- 401(k) with company match
Salary : $165,000 - $225,000