Mercor
Software Engineer, Backend
San Francisco
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 8 days ago
Distributed SystemsGitAPI DevelopmentDesign SystemsLeadershipCommunicationMentoring
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.
Skills
- Fluent in using modern AI development tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) to improve engineering productivity.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising the technical bar across an organization.
- Excellent communication skills-able to make complex tradeoffs legible to both engineers and leadership.
- High ownership, pragmatism, and a bias toward shipping.
Compensation
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
Benefits
- Bi-annual performance bonus structure
- 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
Company info
- by sharing knowledge, experience, and context that can't be captured in code alone.
- Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $3 million a day.
- 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.
- Today, more than 30,000 experts in our network collectively earn over $2 million a day.
- We work in-person five days a week in our new San Francisco headquarters.
- What We're Looking For
This listing is sourced directly from Mercor's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.