Mercor
Software Engineer, Systems & Platform Applied AI
About this role
Mercor seeks a backend systems engineer to design and operate production services powering their AI data platform. You'll own end-to-end feature development—from scoping and design through production operation—building high-throughput data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure that process millions of expert tasks daily.
What you'll do
- Design and build backend services including APIs, data models, background jobs, and data pipelines
- Own features end-to-end: scope problems, write designs, ship code, instrument systems, and maintain production health
- Build and tune high-throughput data pipelines with queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, and backpressure
- Optimize system performance through profiling, caching, latency tuning, and cost attribution
- Instrument systems with observability, metrics, logging, tracing, and proactive alerts
- Participate in on-call rotation, debug production incidents, and document learnings in RCCAs
What they're looking for
- Backend engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency
- API design (REST, gRPC, or GraphQL) with versioning and backward compatibility
- Relational databases: data modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions, safe migrations
- NoSQL and key-value stores
- Distributed systems: queues, event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, partial failure handling
- Data orchestration tools: Airflow, Temporal, or Dagster
- Production operations: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, debugging under load
- Infrastructure as code (Terraform)
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15,000 relocation bonus
- $10,000 housing bonus (within 0.5 miles of office)
- $1,500 monthly meals stipend, plus wellness and laundry reimbursement
- Health, dental, vision insurance and free Equinox membership
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Mercor
Mercor builds a marketplace platform connecting expert talent to AI opportunities, supported by identity infrastructure, matching algorithms, and internal tools for data management. The company is hiring Software Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, Fullstack Engineers, and Security Engineers to develop backend systems, ML models, cloud infrastructure, and distributed platforms.
- Website
- mercor.io
Likely interview questions
- Tell us about a production incident you debugged—what went wrong, how did you find it, and what did you change to prevent recurrence?
- Describe a data pipeline or service you built from scratch. Walk us through your design decisions around consistency, failure handling, and scalability.