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Software Engineer, Systems & Platform Applied AI

Mercor· Engineering
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San Francisco$220k - $500kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Software Engineer focused on backend systems for Mercor's Applied AI stack, owning services, data pipelines, and infrastructure to turn human expertise into training data and scalable workflows for frontier models.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate backend services in the Applied AI stack including APIs, data models, background jobs, and the pipelines that connect them.
  • Own features end to end: scope the problem, 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.
  • Make the system fast and reliable by adding failure recovery in pipelines, profile hot spots, Agent token and cost attribution, caching issues, and set latency, error, cost budgets you actually hold to.
  • Instrument what you ship: observability, metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts that proactively catch problems.
  • Work on modern cutting edge tools, libraries and frameworks.
  • Manage and launch 10s of 1000s of containers, sandbox environments, manage resource allocation and system health.
  • Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform.
  • Participate in on-call for the systems you own, debug production incidents, and write up what you learn in RCCA.
  • Write clear design docs and give useful code review, we make technical decisions in writing and expect everyone to take part.
  • Work directly with product, operations, and research partners to turn ambiguous requirements into systems that ship.

Qualifications

  • 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
  • Strong fundamentals in backend engineering: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and writing code that's clear enough for the next person to change.
  • Hands-on experience with API design - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, and an understanding of versioning, contracts, and backward compatibility.
  • Solid database skills: relational data modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions and isolation, and safe migrations. Familiarity with at least one NoSQL or key-value store and when it's the right choice.
  • Practical experience with distributed systems basics: queues and event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, and designing for partial failure.
  • Experience with Data Orchestration and workflow management systems like Airflow, Temporal, Dagster.
  • Be able to roll your sleeves up and dig deeper into the lower level infrastructure issues container, permissions, logs, traces and find the needle in the haystack.
  • Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring and alerting, and debugging issues under real traffic.
  • Comfort with ambiguity you can take a loosely defined problem, ask the right questions, and come back with a plan.
  • Genuine excitement for agentic development and new technology, fluency with modern AI dev tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), and a real passion for writing good code.
  • Clear written and verbal communication. High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.

Skills

Required:Backend engineering fundamentalsAPI designDatabase skillsDistributed systemsData orchestration/workflowsProduction services

Benefits

  • Bi-annual performance bonus structure
  • Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
  • Up to $15k Relocation bonus
  • $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
  • $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
  • 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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