Job Description
# Software Engineer (SWE) — LLM Superuser
### Uplift Trial Participant
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## About the Role
We're recruiting an exceptional engineer to participate in a structured AI Uplift Trial — a research initiative measuring the productivity and quality gains that expert LLM usage confers on complex software engineering tasks.
This is not a role for someone who occasionally uses AI tools. We need an LLM Superuser: a practitioner with deep, intuitive command of how frontier models think, fail, and excel.
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## What We're Looking For
Engineering Baseline
- 4+ years professional software engineering experience.
- Strong proficiency in at least two languages (Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, etc.).
- Comfortable across the stack: APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, application logic.
LLM Expertise — This Is the Role
- Expert command of prompt engineering: chain-of-thought, few-shot, ReAct, structured outputs, and beyond.
- Experience building agentic systems: tool-calling loops, multi-step reasoning pipelines, orchestration frameworks.
- Deep familiarity with context management: RAG, chunking, vector search, avoiding context degradation.
- Ability to critically evaluate model outputs — catching hallucinations and subtle failures a casual user would miss.
- Strong opinions about where LLMs genuinely help in engineering workflows and where they don't.
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## What "LLM Superuser" Means
You can look at a hard engineering problem and immediately formulate an LLM strategy. You have a personal library of hard-won prompt patterns. You can explain _why_ an approach works — and adapt it on the fly when it doesn't. You treat the model as a collaborator you understand deeply, not a black box you poke randomly.
About Mercor
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