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Tech Lead, Systems & Platform Applied AI

Mercor· Engineering
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San FranciscoFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Tech Lead for the Applied AI Backend Systems responsible for designing and owning the architecture, data models, APIs, and data pipelines for the Applied AI backend domain; leads and mentors engineers, ships production-ready solutions, and collaborates cross-functionally.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture of the Applied AI backend domain; core services, data models, orchestration systems and the pipeline execution layer that the product and ops team in the org depends on.
  • Set the technical direction, then stay hands-on enough to build the hardest parts yourself.
  • Take undefined problems, decide what’s worth building, write the design, ship the code, instrument it, and keep it healthy in production.
  • Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines: queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, and backpressure; address failure recovery, profile hot spots, caching issues, and set latency, error, cost budgets.
  • Own the design review bar for backend work across the org; mentor senior engineers and raise the standard for how we build.
  • Provision and manage infrastructure as code using Terraform and scale to manage tens of thousands of containers; sandbox environments and resource health.
  • Participate in on-call for the systems you own, debug production incidents, and document learnings (RCCA).
  • Drive cross-functional alignment with product, operations, and research partners to turn ambiguous requirements into shippable systems.

Qualifications

  • 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems with a track record of owning architecture across multiple teams.
  • Experience mentoring senior engineers.
  • Strong fundamentals in backend engineering: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and writing maintainable code.
  • Hands-on API design experience - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL; understanding of versioning, contracts, and backward compatibility.
  • Solid database skills: relational modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions and isolation, safe migrations; familiarity with at least one NoSQL or key-value store.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems: queues and event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, design for partial failure.
  • Experience with Data Orchestration/workflow systems (Airflow, Temporal, Dagster).
  • Ability to troubleshoot lower-level infrastructure issues (containers, permissions, logs, traces).
  • Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring/alerting, debugging under real traffic.
  • Comfort with ambiguity and ability to drive plans with strong opinions, loosely held.
  • Genuine excitement for agentic development and modern AI dev tools; strong coding discipline and ownership.

Skills

Required:Backend architectureAPI designDistributed systemsData orchestration/workflow systems

Benefits

  • Bi-annual performance bonus structure
  • Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
  • Up to $15k Relocation bonus
  • $10K housing bonus (within 0.5 miles of office)
  • $1.5K monthly meals stipend
  • Free Equinox membership
  • $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
  • $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
  • Health, Dental, Vision insurance
Last updated Sep 30, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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