Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Systems
$160k - $500k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Agent Engineer
About the job
Mercor is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to build the backend systems and agent infrastructure for their talent network. A significant portion of Mercor's operations rely on agents for sourcing, screening, matching, and supporting experts with minimal human intervention. This role involves designing and deploying the services that power these agents, including orchestration, tool interfaces, evaluation, and data models for auditable and reversible decisions. This is a hands-on engineering position requiring coding, end-to-end system ownership, and collaboration with product, operations, and AI researchers to define agent functionalities and human involvement.
The company is a profitable Series C organization valued at $10 billion, focused on organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy. They are a leading AI data company building the interface between human expertise and advanced AI models, with millions of domain experts earning significant daily income to train frontier AI models. Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work, and Mercor Enterprise extends this infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and own backend services for agentic workflows, including orchestration, tool calling, retries, fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop review.
- Deploy agents to production and iterate based on real usage, optimizing prompts, tools, guardrails, cost, and latency.
- Develop evaluation infrastructure for agent performance, including offline evals, online metrics, and regression detection.
- Design scalable core services, data models, and APIs that adapt to network growth and evolving agent behavior.
- Ensure agent decisions are observable, auditable, and reversible for quick failure detection and understanding.
- Collaborate with product, operations, and AI researchers to determine appropriate agent vs. deterministic workflows and human involvement.
- Establish backend engineering standards and patterns, and elevate the technical capabilities of the engineering team.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
- Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and scalable API design.
- Hands-on experience building production LLM-based systems (agents, tool use, retrieval, evaluation) or a proven ability to quickly learn and ship new systems.
- Comfort with ambiguity and the unique failure modes of agent systems.
- Proven track record of owning systems end-to-end, from design to production operation.
- Proficiency with modern AI development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
- Strong technical judgment and clear written communication skills.
- Excellent communication skills to articulate complex tradeoffs to diverse audiences.
- High degree of ownership, pragmatism, and a bias towards shipping.
Benefits
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- $20K relocation bonus (for Bay Area moves)
- $10K housing bonus (for residents within 0.5 miles of the office)
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Free Equinox membership
- Health insurance