Mercor
Software Engineer, Systems & Platform Applied AI
$220K–$500K
San Francisco · On-site · Full-time · Posted Sep 24, 2026
- Experience
- 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience.
About the job
Builds and operates backend services, APIs, data models, and high-throughput pipelines that support Mercor’s Applied AI platform.
What you'll do
- Design, ship, instrument, and maintain backend services and features in production.
- Build and tune data and job pipelines, including queuing, batching, retries, and failure recovery.
- Manage infrastructure and containers, participate in on-call, and debug production incidents.
What they ask for
- 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.
- Strong backend fundamentals and hands-on API design experience (REST, gRPC, or GraphQL).
- Database and distributed-systems experience, including data modeling, safe migrations, queues, caching, and handling partial failure.
- Experience with workflow orchestration systems and production services, including containers, CI/CD, monitoring, and alerting.
Nice to have
- Experience building or integrating LLM-backed services in production.
- Familiarity with AI infrastructure providers such as Modal, Fireworks, Baseten, or Temporal.
Pay
$220K – $500K USD total pay
Tools
REST, gRPC, GraphQL, Airflow, Temporal, Dagster, Terraform, Claude Code
AI focus
Builds systems and pipelines that turn human expertise into training data for frontier models; the role also mentions agent token and cost attribution.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative