Technology Operations Lead

San FranciscoSenior$100,000 - $200,0005-7 years

About Mercor

Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy. We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work. Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies: helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.

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.

About the role

We're hiring an IT Operations Lead to own the reliability, security, and scalability of our identity, endpoint, and IT infrastructure systems. You'll partner directly with the Head of IT to transform reactive support into strategic, automated systems that prevent problems before they occur — balancing speed, security, and an exceptional user experience for technical teams building the future of AI.

You'll be based in our San Francisco office, collaborating closely with Security, Engineering, and People Ops.

In This Role, You Will:

Handle day-to-day operations and incident response

Triage and resolve Tier 2/3 tickets with a focus on automation and improving response and resolution times
Manage and troubleshoot Apple devices at hyper-scale
Trace root causes across complex, multi-system failures (Rippling → Okta → Kandji → Google Workspace), identify patterns in recurring tickets, and propose automation or self-service solutions
Analyze downstream impacts before making changes; map dependencies and blast radius for SSO, MDM, and access-control changes
Build and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge base articles that elevate team capabilities
Lead small projects that address operational pain points (BYOD policies, international provisioning, compliance evidence collection)
Translate technical issues for non-technical stakeholders (People Ops, Finance, Legal) during incidents and changes
Mentor future IT team members on troubleshooting methodology and systems thinking
Participate in an on-call rotation and help establish sustainable escalation procedures as the team grows

You May Be a Good Fit If You:

5–7 years in IT Operations or Technical Support roles, ideally supporting technical teams (SaaS, cloud, AI/ML environments)
Systems thinker who naturally traces dependencies, considers second-order effects, and asks "why did this break?" not just "how do I fix it?"
Strong incident management skills: triage, root-cause analysis, blameless postmortems, pattern recognition
Understanding of compliance controls (access management, logging, change management)
Clear communicator who can explain technical issues to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders and write excellent documentation
Self-directed with a bias to action and strong judgment on when to escalate versus resolve independently
Solves problems others gave up on through creative, systematic troubleshooting
Thinks through second- and third-order effects before making changes
Documents solutions that help everyone, not just yourself
Builds trust through technical competence and calm, clear communication under pressure

Strong Candidates May Also Have Experience With:

Expert troubleshooting across the Apple ecosystem, including MDM (Kandji, Jamf, Intune)
Advanced Google Workspace and Okta administration (SAML/OIDC, lifecycle automation, SCIM provisioning)
Multi-cloud Support (AWS, Azure, GCP)
Network troubleshooting (DNS, VPNs, VLANs)
Scripting and automation (Python, Bash) and APIs for repetitive tasks and integrations, plus low-code automation tools (Okta Workflows, Zapier)

What Makes This Role Unique

You'll spend most of your day handling tickets and incidents — but you won't just fix problems, you'll ask why they exist and work to prevent them. If you see the same issue three times, you'll write the runbook, propose the automation, or flag the upstream fix. As we scale, you'll hire and mentor the next IT Operations team members, shaping how we support a fast-growing AI company.