Applied AI Backend Engineer: Build Scalable Pipelines

mercor.com; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Dental, Vision insurance

Bi-annual performance bonus

Equity grant

Relocation bonus

Housing stipend

Meals stipend

Free Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Job summary

Mercor is seeking a Backend Engineer to own and operate core services in the Applied AI stack. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines that move work through the platform, ship production features, and grow to own larger surfaces quickly.

You will work with a dense engineering team, handle high traffic, and contribute to observability, testing, and on‑call incident response while collaborating with product and research to deliver reliable AI-ready systems.

Qualifications

• 2–5 years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, concurrency.
• Hands-on API design experience (REST, gRPC, GraphQL).
• Relational and NoSQL databases; safe migrations.
• Distributed systems knowledge: queues, caching, retries.
• Experience with data orchestration tools like Airflow, Temporal, Dagster.
• Production experience: containers, CI/CD, monitoring.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and own plans.
• Interest in AI tooling and modern AI development tools.
• Strong written and verbal communication; ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services in the Applied AI stack.
• Own features end to end: scope, design, ship, instrument, and maintain production health.
• Build and tune high‑throughput data and job pipelines.
• Improve system reliability: latency, errors, and cost budgets.
• Instrument ships: metrics, logging, tracing, alerts.
• Work with modern tools, libraries, and frameworks.
• Manage and launch thousands of containers and sandbox environments.
• Infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Participate in on‑call and RCCA investigations.
• Write clear design docs and participate in code reviews.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and research to ship.

Skills

Backend fundamentals

API design

Distributed systems

Databases

Observability

Containers CI/CD

Tools

Airflow

Temporal

Dagster

Terraform

Job description

Mercor is seeking a Backend Engineer to own and operate core services in the Applied AI stack. You will design data models, APIs, and pipelines that move work through the platform, ship production features, and grow to own larger surfaces quickly.

You will work with a dense engineering team, handle high traffic, and contribute to observability, testing, and on‑call incident response while collaborating with product and research to deliver reliable AI-ready systems.