2 months ago
Base Salary
$250k - $500k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of shared backend systems, including core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
- Define and drive long-term backend architecture strategy across the organization.
- Design for scale, reliability, and evolvability while leading high-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
- Identify and reduce architectural debt and lead complex cross-team migrations.
- Establish backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices for product teams.
- Prototype critical systems, ship production code, and unblock teams on difficult technical problems.
- Mentor senior engineers and raise the organization’s technical bar.
- Partner with engineering and product leadership on build-versus-buy decisions, platform investments, and technical hiring.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 3+ years at a Senior level or above.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
- Experience owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization and making durable technical decisions.
- Experience leading large, complex production migrations without stopping the business.
- Ability to drive alignment through technical judgment and clear writing rather than authority.
- Fluency with modern AI development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, or GitHub Copilot.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.
- Excellent communication skills for explaining complex tradeoffs to engineers and leadership.
- High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.
Benefits
- In-person work five days per week in San Francisco, New York City, or London offices.
- Generous equity grant vested over four years.
- $20K relocation bonus if moving to the Bay Area.
- $10K housing bonus for living within 0.5 miles of the office.
- $1.5K monthly meal stipend.
- Free Equinox membership.
- Health insurance.
Categories
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.