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Software Engineer, Identity

Mercor· Engineering
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San Francisco$160k - $325kFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Mercor is hiring a Software Engineer, Identity to design and operate large-scale identity and access systems, including SpiceDB-backed authorization, audience rule engine integration, and provisioning fan-out across multiple downstream providers. The role focuses on building secure, scalable, and reliable identity infrastructure for a global expert network and non-human principals.

Responsibilities

  • Keep a billion-plus weekly permission checks correct and fast. Own the hot path: the SpiceDB schema, the relationship graph, and the caching, denormalization, and consistency tradeoffs that decide whether authorization is invisible or the reason a page is slow
  • Model authorization in SpiceDB. Design the definitions, relations, and permissions expressing how experts, employees, workspaces, channels, projects, and client engagements relate, and evolve that schema without breaking live checks
  • Extend the Audiences rule engine. Add providers, express new access rules, and make the fan-out reliable enough that operations trusts it without a human checking
  • Scale the downstream providers themselves (Slack Enterprise Grid, GitHub, Google Workspace, DLP and monitoring), including the bulk operations, quota engineering, and reconciliation that none of them make easy
  • Own provisioning fan-out end to end, with reconciliation that catches drift rather than trusting that every write succeeded
  • Close the gap between HR truth and system truth. Build lifecycle automation that degrades safely when the source of truth is wrong or late
  • Extend identity to non-human principals. Agents and services increasingly need first-class identities, scoped credentials, and auditable authorization
  • Talk directly with ops teams to understand business requirements, then translate them into large-scale distributed systems designed with security in mind from the start
  • Design for the security implications of what you're building. Not auditing after the fact, but thinking through how gaps in system design compound at scale

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related technical degree such as Electrical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, Information Systems or Statistics
  • 2–5 years in engineering
  • Strong product engineering fundamentals. You've built and operated systems in production, you care about correctness and reliability, and you're comfortable owning scope without a lot of hand-holding
  • Large-scale distributed systems experience. This is the most identifiable signal on a resume and a strong filter; the problems here are genuinely unprecedented in scale
  • Comfort with data modeling under consistency constraints. You've reasoned about stale reads, cache invalidation, and eventual consistency in a system where being wrong has real consequences
  • Experience pushing third-party platforms past their intended limits. Rate limits, quotas, bulk APIs, and the reconciliation you build when a vendor's guarantees run out
  • Security-minded thinking. Not a formal background necessarily, but the instinct to ask "how does this break, and what are the consequences?" when designing a system
  • Adaptability. We don't want someone who will come in and replicate what they've done before; Mercor's landscape is unique and requires genuine intellectual flexibility

Skills

Required:SpiceDB / Zanzibar / ReBAC conceptsDistributed systems designData modeling under consistency constraints

Benefits

  • Generous equity, vested over 4 years
  • Up to $15K relocation bonus
  • $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of the office)
  • $1,500/month meals stipend
  • Free Equinox membership
  • $200/month laundry reimbursement
  • $200/month personal wellness reimbursement
  • Health, Dental, and Vision insurance
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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