Backend Engineer, AI Environments & Pipelines

Mercor; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Performance bonus

Equity grant

Relocation bonus

Housing bonus

Meals stipend

Equinox membership

Laundry reimbursement

Wellness reimbursement

Health insurance

Job summary

Mercor seeks an experienced backend/infrastructure engineer to own the environments platform, from authoring to lab delivery. You will design and operate the core runtime, build APIs and services for lab customers, and ensure reliability at scale across thousands of sandboxes.

You will work with product, operations, and research to translate ambiguous requirements into robust, scalable systems, with ownership of end-to-end delivery and on-call responsibilities.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems.
• Hands-on API design with versioning and backward compatibility.
• Relational databases: data modeling, query performance, safe migrations.
• Advanced Linux and container proficiency; debugging at scale.
• Experience running workloads on Kubernetes or serverless like Modal.
• Production services: containers, CI/CD, monitoring, alerting under real traffic.
• Clear written and verbal communication; strong ownership and shipping bias.

Responsibilities

• Own pipelines taking an environment from authoring to lab handoff, including packaging, validation, and versioning.
• Design, build, and operate the core environment runtime for scalable sandbox execution.
• Build services other teams use to run environments and the APIs their lab customers depend on.
• Extend harnesses to run agents inside environments and ensure results align with stack outputs.
• Own features end to end: scope, design, ship, instrument, and keep healthy in production.
• Work with modern tools, libraries, and frameworks to stay current.
• Build for scale and reliability in pipelines and job systems: queueing, batching, retries, backpressure, recovery.
• Participate in on-call for owned systems and document learnings (RCCA).
• Collaborate with product, operations, and research to turn ambiguous requirements into shippable systems.

Skills

Data structures

Concurrency

Distributed systems

API design

Relational databases

Linux

Containers

Kubernetes

Serverless (Modal)

Production systems

Tools

Modal

Temporal

Airflow

Dagster

CI/CD tooling

Terraform

Job description

Mercor seeks an experienced backend/infrastructure engineer to own the environments platform, from authoring to lab delivery. You will design and operate the core runtime, build APIs and services for lab customers, and ensure reliability at scale across thousands of sandboxes.

You will work with product, operations, and research to translate ambiguous requirements into robust, scalable systems, with ownership of end-to-end delivery and on-call responsibilities.