Database Systems Evaluation Expert

About the Role

Mercor is running a pilot where experts build real-world tasks that test how well AI agents handle database engineering. Depending on your specialty, the task covers database-engine implementation, production diagnosis or application migration. Applications close Friday, October 9, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific, and the first three qualifying applicants are selected.

What You'll Do

• Design one challenging, self-contained database engineering task, with a problem statement, reproducible repository or environment, working reference solution, tests and grading criteria
• Build checks for correctness, failure handling, concurrency, retries and regressions
• Evaluate performance measures such as latency, throughput and memory use
• Write grading criteria that separate robust engineering from solutions that only look correct
• Refine and validate the task with technical reviewers

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on database-engine internals experience, or a database-systems PhD
• Deep experience with storage engines, query execution, optimization, transactions, replication or similar low-latency systems
• Strong implementation skills and clear reasoning about correctness and performance tradeoffs
• DBA, SQL analytics, ETL or application-only database experience does not qualify on its own

Compensation & Logistics

• Pay: $2,200 flat for one task, about 25 hours of work, followed by technical and feedback review (task deadline Tuesday, October 13, 2026)
• Application: a self-paced technical assessment of about 35 minutes with written responses and a coding exercise, completed independently without AI assistance
• Requires a laptop or desktop with camera, microphone and full-screen sharing, your own editor and terminal, Python 3.8+ and a C, C++, Rust, Go or Java compiler
• Remote, no location restriction stated