2 days ago
Base Salary
$220k - $500k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, operate, and own backend services, APIs, data models, background jobs, and data pipelines.
- Develop high-throughput pipelines using queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, backpressure, and failure recovery.
- Improve system performance and reliability through profiling, caching, latency and error budgets, observability, and cost controls.
- Manage and launch tens of thousands of containers and sandbox environments while handling resource allocation and system health.
- Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform.
- Participate in on-call, debug production incidents, and document learnings in RCCA.
- Write design documents, review code, and collaborate with product, operations, and research partners.
Requirements
- 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
- Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and maintainable software development.
- Hands-on API design experience with REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, including versioning, contracts, and backward compatibility.
- Strong database knowledge covering relational modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions, isolation, safe migrations, and NoSQL or key-value stores.
- Practical distributed-systems experience with queues, event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, and partial-failure handling.
- Experience with data orchestration and workflow management systems such as Airflow, Temporal, or Dagster.
- Experience running production services with containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and real-traffic debugging.
- Ability to investigate lower-level infrastructure issues involving containers, permissions, logs, and traces.
- Comfort working with ambiguous requirements and strong written and verbal communication.
- Preferred experience building or integrating LLM-backed services in production and familiarity with Modal, Fireworks, Baseten, or Temporal.
- Familiarity with modern AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot.
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure and generous equity grant vesting over four years.
- Up to $15,000 relocation bonus and a $10,000 housing bonus for employees living within 0.5 miles of the office.
- $1,500 monthly meal stipend, free Equinox membership, and $200 monthly reimbursements for laundry and personal wellness.
- Health, dental, and vision insurance.
- In-person work five days per week in San Francisco, New York City, or London offices.
About Mercor
Mercor builds an expert-powered platform that trains, evaluates, and deploys AI systems for AI labs and enterprises. It operates APEX to assess model performance on economically valuable tasks, and provides services such as custom AI agents and teams of vetted domain experts who encode organizational knowledge into AI. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco, it is privately held and works with frontier AI labs and enterprise clients requiring strict data isolation.