Tamir Shmerling grew up in Ashkelon, Israel, and served as bassist in an Israeli Defense Forces orchestra from 2005 to 2008. After completing his military service he worked in big bands in Tel Aviv and Holon while studying at the Rimon School of Music, one of Israel's principal contemporary music conservatories. In 2008 he was awarded a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, where his teachers included Hal Crook, Ralph Peterson Jr., Terri Lyne Carrington, Greg Osby, Jamey Haddad, Alain Mallet, John Lockwood, and Ed Tomassi. Since relocating to the United States he has performed and recorded with a wide range of artists, among them Terri Lyne Carrington, Kevin Eubanks, Jerry Bergonzi, Alain Mallet, Carmen Lundy, Lizz Wright, Ingrid Jensen, Adam Rogers, Nona Hendryx, Gretchen Parlato, Helen Sung, Ofer Ganor, Avishai Cohen, Ignacio Berroa, Jason Palmer, and Jerome Sabbagh.

His first American studio credit came in 2015, recording bass on saxophonist Miles Donahue's The Bug (released 2017 on Whaling City Sound, with guitarist Mike Stern and saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi also in the band). Further sideman dates followed through the second half of the decade with pianist Addison Frei's trio, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, Israeli pianist Guy Mintus's trio, and the Dan Pugach Nonet. In 2018 he recorded on Eli Degibri's Soul Station, a tribute to Hank Mobley's 1960 Blue Note album of the same name, cut July 5 and 6, 2017 with pianist Tom Oren and drummer Eviatar Slivnik rounding out the quartet. By the time of that release Shmerling had become a working member of the Eli Degibri Quartet, playing dates with the group at Smalls in New York in both 2017 and 2019.

New York's Smalls and Mezzrow clubs became Shmerling's steady home base from the 2010s onward. SmallsLIVE's own dated performance archive documents more than a decade of regular appearances there: with the Mario Castro Quintet, the Eyal Vilner Big Band, the Hailey Niswanger Quartet, the Wayne Tucker Quintet and Sextet, Itai Kriss and Telavana, and a long-running Mezzrow trio partnership with pianist Peter Mazza and organist Misha Tsiganov. His most sustained rhythm-section pairing has been with pianist Victor Gould, whose trio he anchored at Mezzrow and Smalls repeatedly between 2019 and 2026 alongside drummers including E.J. Strickland, Anwar Marshall, Kush Abadey, and Mark Whitfield Jr. In January 2024 he shared a Mezzrow bill billed simply as "Davis Whitfield, Tamir Shmerling & Eviatar Slivnik," reuniting him on the bandstand with his Soul Station bandmate. He has also worked regularly with Amos Hoffman's quintet and vocal-trumpeter Wayne Tucker's various New York groups, and has performed at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Martha's Vineyard Jazz Festival, and the Toronto Jazz Festival.

Shmerling's recorded work has carried him beyond the New York scene as well. He is the bassist on two albums led by Japanese drummer Tomohiro Mori, Grand Slam (2016) and Uptown Bound (2018), both featuring pianist Takeshi Ohbayashi and saxophonist Braxton Cook. On Ohbayashi's own trio album Manhattan (2016, Somethin' Cool), he splits the rhythm chair with bassist Yasushi Nakamura, playing four of the eight tracks alongside drummer Terri Lyne Carrington while Nakamura and drummer Nate Smith cover the other four. More recent sideman credits include pianist Dave Meder's Passage (2019), vocalist-pianist Hila Kulik's More Than a Change (2023, featuring saxophonist Itai Kriss and reed player Alexander Levin), pianist Victor Gould's In Our Time (2021), and singer-songwriter Grant Richards's Menagerie (2024).

Shmerling is a modern, swing-rooted bassist equally comfortable on double bass and electric bass, with a big-band and military-orchestra foundation that gave way to a New York career built almost entirely around post-bop small-group work. He functions as a first-call sideman rather than a leader, valued for anchoring working rhythm sections over years rather than one-off session dates, as his repeated multi-year pairings with pianists Victor Gould and Takeshi Ohbayashi and his standing membership in Eli Degibri's touring quartet both demonstrate.