Member of Technical Staff, Applied AI Backend
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 19h ago
About the job
Mercor is a leading AI data company building the layer between human expertise and frontier models. We are seeking a Software Engineer for our Applied AI Backend team to own and build services within our stack. This role involves designing data models, building APIs, and developing data pipelines that move work through the platform. You will take roughly scoped problems, make design decisions, ship to production, and own the services afterward. This is a hands-on build role for individuals with strong backend fundamentals and experience operating real-world services, including handling schema migrations, optimizing performance under load, and designing resilient systems.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate backend services including APIs, data models, background jobs, and connecting pipelines.
- Own features end-to-end: scope, design, code, instrument, and maintain in production.
- Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines, focusing on queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, and backpressure.
- Enhance system speed and reliability by implementing failure recovery, profiling performance bottlenecks, and managing latency, error, and cost budgets.
- Instrument shipped code with observability, metrics, logging, tracing, and alerts.
- Manage and launch large-scale containerized environments, including sandbox environments and resource allocation.
- Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform.
- Participate in on-call rotations, debug production incidents, and document learnings.
- Write clear design documents and provide constructive code reviews.
- Collaborate with product, operations, and research teams to translate requirements into functional systems.
Requirements
- 2-5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
- Strong backend fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and writing maintainable code.
- Hands-on experience with API design (REST, gRPC, or GraphQL) and understanding of versioning and backward compatibility.
- Solid database skills: relational data modeling, indexing, query performance, transactions, isolation, and safe migrations.
- Familiarity with at least one NoSQL or key-value store and its appropriate use cases.
- Practical experience with distributed systems basics: queues, event streams, caching, idempotency, rate limiting, and designing for partial failure.
- Experience with Data Orchestration and workflow management systems like Airflow, Temporal, or Dagster.
- Ability to investigate and resolve low-level infrastructure issues (containers, permissions, logs, traces).
- Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting, and debugging under traffic.
- Comfort with ambiguity and ability to develop plans for loosely defined problems.
- Genuine excitement for agentic development and modern AI dev tools.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, high ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
- Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
- Up to $15k Relocation bonus
- $10K housing bonus (if living within 0.5 miles of office)
- $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
- Free Equinox membership
- $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
- $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
- Health, Dental, Vision insurance