Mercor
Tech Lead, Systems & Platform Applied AI
San Francisco · Senior
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 22 days ago
Distributed SystemsData StructuresAlgorithmsNoSQLTerraformCI/CDTemporalAPI DevelopmentGraphQLRESTgRPCAirflowData EngineeringLLMsControlsResearchLeadershipMentoring
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Entry-level history0
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Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70
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About the role
- We have synthetic pipelines and modular quality control systems that run in unison to generate highest quality tasks and at scale.
- All of it runs on backend systems that have to stay reliable, fast, and observable while the volume behind them grows every month.
- We're hiring for depth in backend fundamentals rather than any particular domain.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of the Applied AI backend domain
- Set the technical direction, then stay hands-on enough to build the hardest parts yourself.
- Build and tune high-throughput data and job pipelines: queuing, batching, idempotency, retries, and backpressure.
- Own the design review bar for backend work across the org. Mentor senior engineers, make the technical tradeoffs legible to leadership in writing, and raise the standard for how we build.
- Participate in on-call for the systems you own, debug production incidents, and write up what you learn in RCCA.
- Drive XFN alignment across teams through technical judgment and work directly with product, operations, and research partners to turn ambiguous requirements into systems that ship.
- 8+ years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems with a track record of owning architecture across multiple teams and of decisions that aged well.
- Provision and manage infrastructure as code using Terraform and at scale.
Requirements
- Experience mentoring senior engineers, not just junior ones.
- Hands-on experience with API design - REST, gRPC, or GraphQL, and an understanding of versioning, contracts, and backward compatibility.
Nice to have
- Free Equinox membership
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.
- Deep, hands-on expertise in distributed systems:
- 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.
- Experience running services in production: containers, CI/CD, monitoring and alerting, and debugging issues under real traffic.
- Strong opinions, loosely held.
- Clear written and verbal communication.
- High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.
- Nice to Have
- Familiarity with AI infrastructure providers like Modal, Fireworks, Baseten, Temporal
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
Compensation
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
Benefits
- 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
- $200 monthly laundry reimbursement
- $200 monthly personal wellness reimbursement
- Health, Dental, Vision insurance
- Manage and launch 10s of 1000s of containers, sandbox environments, manage resource allocation and system health.
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.
- You'll take problems that arrive undefined, decide what's worth building, and own the outcome - the scoping is part of the job, write the design, ship the code, instrument it, and keep it healthy in production.
- What we are Looking For
This listing is sourced directly from Mercor's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.