Shaun Vanweelden
Managing Director at Mercor
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolShaun Vanweelden is a Senior Technical Program Manager Lead and seasoned software leader who blends hands-on engineering with program-level execution across AI and data-intensive products. He helped scale Mercor from $1M to $500M+ ARR in 15 months as Managing Director and previously led Human Data Operations at OpenAI, shaping RLHF annotation strategy, budgets, vendor policy, and even congressional responses. Earlier roles at Scale AI saw him build and run field engineering, computer vision engagements, and developer success teams that delivered mission-critical data pipelines for customers like GM, Toyota, and Microsoft. Shaun thrives as the bridge between researchers, engineers, and business stakeholders, pairing empathy-driven people leadership with deep operational rigor. He still codes—shipping projects like REALevals.xyz and BrickIt.build—and prefers tackling first-of-kind problems: standing up compliance, tooling, and talent programs that become long-lived company assets. Based in the Bay Area with a software engineering degree from Iowa State, he’s equally at home debugging model data flows as he is designing humane, auditable human-in-the-loop systems.
5 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science Software Engineering, Bachelor of Science Software Engineering at Iowa State University
Github Skills (11)
open-source10
game-development10
game-engine10
godot9
simulation9
physics-engine8
physics8
collision7
cpp7
collision-detection7
gdscript2
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
sjharb/NavigationServer2DTest
Aug 2022 - Aug 2022
Contributions:4 releases, 40 commits, 39 pushes in 11 days
sjharb/godot
Mar 2023 - Mar 2023
Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine
Contributions:1 push, 10 branches in 4 days
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