Software Engineer, C — Codebase Q&A

• Select tasks from a pre-validated pool of C repositories, each pinned to a specific git commit and arriving with an engineering question, positive and negative rubrics, foils, and a golden solution
• Explore the repository until you genuinely understand the subsystem in question, including the relevant PR or issue history
• Rewrite the task's question so it defeats frontier coding agents while remaining well-defined and fairly answerable
• Adjust rubrics and foils so they reward correct reasoning and reject plausible-but-wrong answers
• Run the full validation loop in Studio — Check, Golden, Run, Analyze — and iterate until every stage passes
• Document your work in the task README and submit for expert review, addressing reviewer feedback on returned tasks

• Demonstrated ability to navigate a large, unfamiliar C codebase and explain how it behaves at runtime — not just what the source says
• Comfort with the things that make C systems hard to read: preprocessor-heavy builds, platform conditionals, manual memory management, and autotools/CMake/Meson build graphs

• Experience with databases, cryptography, networking protocols, or systems programming is highly relevant — the task mix is weighted toward architecture and system design (39%) and code onboarding (34%), with a meaningful security slice

Project and contracting process: Mercor. Applications continue on the provider's website.