Mercor

Mercor

Member of Technical Staff, Backend

San Francisco · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 83 days ago
Distributed SystemsGitAPI DevelopmentDesign SystemsLeadershipCommunicationMentoring

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Sponsors this role90
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70

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About the role

  • Mercor's products-talent matching, assessment, expert workflows-are growing faster than any single team can architect for.
  • You'll define the technical direction of the systems they all depend on: core services, data models, APIs, and infrastructure patterns that must scale with a network of tens of thousands of experts and the demands of the world's leading AI labs.
  • This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a management role.

Responsibilities

  • Own the architecture of Mercor's shared backend systems-core services, data models, APIs, and cross-product infrastructure.
  • Define and drive the long-term technical strategy for backend architecture across the organization.
  • Design systems for scale, reliability, and evolvability, and lead the highest-stakes technical decisions and design reviews.
  • Identify and pay down architectural debt that slows product teams, and lead complex cross-team migrations.
  • Partner with engineering and product leadership on build-vs-buy decisions, platform investments, and technical hiring.
  • Deep expertise in distributed systems, service architecture, data modeling, and API design at scale.
  • Strong opinions, loosely held: you drive alignment through technical judgment and clear writing, not authority.

Requirements

  • 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Senior level or above.
  • A track record of owning architecture across multiple teams or an entire organization-and of decisions that aged well.
  • Experience leading large, complex technical migrations in production without stopping the business.
  • Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.

Benefits

  • Generous equity grant vested over 4 years
  • A $20K relocation bonus (if moving to the Bay Area)
  • A $10K housing bonus (if you live within 0.5 miles of our office)
  • A $1.5K monthly stipend for meals
  • Health insurance

Company info

  • Mercor's mission is to organize human intelligence to power the AI economy.
  • We're a leading AI data company, building the layer between human expertise and frontier models.
  • Millions of domain experts on the platform are paid over $4 million per day to train frontier AI models.
  • Mercor's APEX benchmark family measures AI's real-world impact on professional work.
  • Mercor Enterprise brings this same infrastructure to Fortune 500 companies:
  • helping companies capture how their best people actually work, translating that expertise directly back into agents.
  • Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement.
  • Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team.
  • You'll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society.
  • Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion.
  • We work in-person five days a week in our San Francisco, NYC, or London offices.
  • What We're Looking For

This listing is sourced directly from Mercor's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.